Photograph: Orlando Sierra/AFP via Getty
Cases of SARS-CoV-2 have been on the rise in the past month, with global cases increasing by more than 19,000 in the past month compared to the previous month, according to data published on the World Health Organization. COVID-19 Dashboard.
But the true number of infections is much higher, researchers say, because countries are less focused on collecting data on infections now than during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Surveillance is ongoing, but it is at a much lower level than it was before,” says Maria Van Kerkhove, interim director of the Department of Epidemiology and Pandemic Management at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. “We do not have a complete picture of the spread of the virus for the variants that are out there.” “I think there is a collective amnesia right now about coronavirus,” she adds.
Even if people test positive after using a home antibody test, there is no way to report a positive result in the community, says Antonia Ho, a clinical epidemiologist at the University of Glasgow in the UK.
Without high-quality surveillance data, he warns, health organizations are not well prepared to recommend corresponding vaccine formulations and determine the timing of their deployment. “Monitoring is crucial to truly understanding what is being traded,” she says.
How is COVID-19 tracked?
Although the surveillance data used to track the absolute number of SARS-CoV-2 infections is less robust than during the pandemic, researchers are tracking information about the number of people with severe cases of COVID-19 who need to be hospitalized. “Monitoring in hospitals is mostly what we do,” says Ho. “But we also have wastewater monitoring, which is a very useful indicator of what is happening in the community.”
Genomic analysis of samples containing the SARS-CoV-2 virus shows that the most common variants currently circulating globally are XFG, also known as Stratus or the “Frankenstein variant,” and NB.1.8.1, known as Nimbus. Stratus represents 76% of reported cases, and is dominant in Europe and the Americas, while nimbus is dominant in the Western Pacific region, accounting for 15% of cases, Van Kerkhove says.
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Stratus and Nimbus have similar symptoms to the previous variants including fever, cough and runny nose, but the Nimbus variant has one distinct symptom: a sore throat with a razor blade. These two variants are currently on the World Health Organization’s list of “currently circulating COVID-19 variants under surveillance” as of September 4.
Van Kerkhove says the latest information about SARS-CoV-2 strains is far from the complete picture of the viral cycle. Even hospitalization data is not as complete as it was during the pandemic – Less than 35 Countries are still reporting COVID-19 data. “That’s why we’re trying to make sure countries are still doing the sequencing,” says Van Kerkhove.
But she adds that the monitoring data currently available is sufficient “to provide information to governments regarding the effectiveness of vaccines.”
Is COVID-19 seasonal?
Vaccination campaigns are focusing on people over the age of 65 in the United States, or 75 in the United Kingdom and parts of Europe, and those with weakened immune systems who are over 6 months old. Michael Head, an epidemiologist at the University of Southampton in the UK, says he would prefer to roll out the vaccine more widely to younger populations as well. “It’s still not a fun infection, and vaccines still have a huge public health benefit, so they are a vital tool in tackling the threat posed by Covid-19.”