Though it may feel like COVID-19 is a thing of the past, experts fear another winter surge may be coming, just in time for the holiday season. If you plan to travel or gather with loved ones, here are the precautions you should be taking this year.
Get boosted now. Dr. Kristin Moffitt, an infectious disease physician at Boston Children’s Hospital, suggests getting your Omicron booster ASAP, instead of waiting until just before the holidays. After getting vaccinated, it takes a week or two for your immune response to develop. That protection should stay strong for at least two months, so “if people got boosted now, their maximum immunity from that booster would get them through the end of 2022,” she says.
Rapid test before you gather. When new variants emerge, there’s often concern that at-home tests won’t be able to detect them. But Dr. Roy Gulick, chief of infectious disease at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian, says rapid tests should still pick up newer variants BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, since they’re Omicron relatives. If you test negative but have classic COVID-19 symptoms such as sore throat, chills, and body aches, it’s still best to stay home, Gulick says.
Stay safe during travel. Masks aren’t required for most travel anymore, but Gulick advises wearing one, at least during certain portions of your trip. In general, air quality on planes is better than on buses and trains, so your chances of getting sick in the air are fairly low. But Gulick recommends masking in the airport and when your plane is taxiing, since filtration systems may not be turned on when the plane is grounded. And if you’re traveling by bus or train, it’s a good idea to mask during the entire journey.
Don’t forget about other viruses. In addition to COVID-19, influenza and RSV are also sickening lots of people right now. Moffitt says that's an extra reason to take precautions like masking during travel and avoiding high-risk settings, such as crowded indoor events, before your holiday plans, particularly if you’ll be seeing anyone immunocompromised.
TODAY'S CORONAVIRUS OUTLOOK
More than 630.2 million people around the world had been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of 9 am. E.T. today, and nearly 6.6 million people have died. On Oct. 30, there were 166,160 new cases and 466 new deaths confirmed globally.
Here's how the world as a whole is currently trending, in terms of cases:
And in terms of deaths:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
And here's every country that has reported over 10 million cases:
The U.S. had recorded more than 97.4 million coronavirus cases as of 9 am. E.T. today. More than 1.07 million people have died. On Oct. 30, there were 3,107 new cases reported in the U.S., and 2 deaths were confirmed.
Here's how the country as a whole is currently trending in terms of cases:
And in terms of deaths:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of Oct. 31. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
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WHAT ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW
New reporting from Vanity Fair and ProPublica backs the idea that SARS-CoV-2 may have first escaped from a laboratory. The outlets’ investigation reveals a history of safety concerns at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology—a coronavirus research lab that some experts believe is at the root of the virus’ spread—and details a suspicious visit from a high-ranking government official around the time people in China began coming down with COVID-19. Chinese officials have pushed back on the reporting, calling the lab-leak theory a “lie fabricated by anti-China forces.”
Recent research from a team in Italy, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, helps illuminate how COVID-19 vaccinations and infections may affect the risk of future sickness. The researchers found that prior infections were associated with a 65% lower risk of future infections—more than the 36% drop in infection risk associated with vaccination, though the study did not look at new bivalent boosters. Both vaccinations and prior cases of COVID-19 provided very strong protection against future hospitalization, the study says.
Nasal vaccines could do a better job of blocking SARS-CoV-2 infections than injected vaccines—so why aren’t any available in the U.S. yet? As my colleague Alice Park reports, their development is both a scientific and a political challenge. Given the perception that COVID-19 is no longer an urgent threat to public health, and some setbacks in nasal vaccine development, many companies aren’t eager to pay for the complicated trials required to make these promising products.
Thanks for reading. We hope you find the Coronavirus Brief newsletter to be a helpful tool to navigate this very complex situation, and welcome feedback at coronavirus.brief@time.com. If you have specific questions you'd like us to answer, please send them to covidquestions@time.com.
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Today's newsletter was written by Jamie Ducharme and edited by Angela Haupt.
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