Colorado is so far experiencing its most typical respiratory virus season since the start of the pandemic, but no one knows whether the bugs have any tricks to pull over the winter months.

In the winters of 2020 and 2021, COVID-19 raged while influenza and respiratory syncytial virus — or RSV — essentially took some time off.

Last year, with most precautions gone, the other viruses made their seasonal appearance earlier than they usually do, and RSV overflowed pediatric hospital beds as young children went through their first bout with it. While most people only develop a cold when they get RSV, it can be severe for babies, toddlers and older adults.

Read more at The Denver Post.

Not enough Americans are being vaccinated against Covid, the flu and RSV to stem rising numbers of the respiratory illnesses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday.

The agency issued a health alert to doctors across the country, warning that low vaccination rates amid “ongoing increases in national and international respiratory disease activity” could strain U.S. health care systems in the coming weeks, and called on doctors to encourage their patients to get the shots immediately to protect them for the remainder of the season.

Read more at NBC.

With respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) season in full swing, newborn babies and infants are at risk of getting very sick from this virus.

Each year in the United States, RSV leads to approximately 100 to 300 deaths in children younger than 5 years old and up to 80,000 hospitalizations among that age group, accordingTrusted Source to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Today, CDC officials sent out a warning about low vaccination rates, which could mean more people will be exposed to flu, COVID-19, and RSV this winter. Officials released a Health Alert Network Health Advisory warning healthcare providers about the low vaccination rates and encouraging them to administer flu, COVID-19, and RSV vaccines to eligible patients. The CDC reports that hospitalizations for RSV have increased 60% in the last four weeks for all age groups.

Read more at Healthline.

The global anti-vaccine movement and vaccine hesitancy that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic show no signs of abating.

According to a survey of U.S. adults, Americans in October 2023 were less likely to view approved vaccines as safe than they were in April 2021. As vaccine confidence falls, health misinformation continues to spread like wildfire on social media and in real life.

I am a public health expert in health misinformation, science communication and health behavior change.

Read more at The Conversation.

Now is the time to get vaccinated to stay safe and healthy amid holiday gatherings and rising levels of respiratory viruses, including the flu, Covid-19 and RSV, experts say.

“To protect yourself and your family this holiday season, take the steps that we do every year to protect ourselves,” Dr. Mandy Cohen, director of the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a video posted to social media Wednesday. “It’s not too late to get vaccinated if you haven’t already.”

Read more at CNN.

Last year, days after the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccines were authorized for emergency use in children as young as 6 months, Laura Labarre’s children’s pediatrician’s office held a large drive-through vaccine event at a local amusement park.

“It was beautifully organized, and we just drove right up. The kids never even got out of their car seats,” said Labarre, a mom of two in Portland, Oregon.

This fall, wanting to get her kids the updated Covid-19 vaccine that was released in mid-September, she called the same pediatrician’s office, thinking it would be a piece of cake.

Read more at CNN.

COVID-19 vaccines for children received a good deal of scrutiny when they first became available in 2021. Chatter online and elsewhere indicated that parents were becoming less likely to vaccinate their children due to growing misinformation around the COVID-19 vaccines. 

But were parents really becoming more vaccine-hesitant because of rumors about the COVID-19 vaccines? Sean O’Leary, MD, MPH, a professor of pediatrics in the Section of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and an investigator at the Adult & Child Center for Outcomes Research & Delivery Science (ACCORDS), wasn’t so sure. 

“Throughout the pandemic, you saw a lot of headlines around COVID vaccine refusal and how that refusal was spilling over into other routine vaccines,” O’Leary says. “But a lot of that was based on stories or personal narratives, interviews with parents or pediatricians or family doctors. I work with a lot of general pediatricians, and I’m married to one, and I was hearing the other side of that coin — that some people who formerly refused vaccines were now asking to catch their kids up. It seemed a lot more complicated than simply, ‘People are refusing COVID vaccines, so now more are refusing other routine childhood vaccines.’”

Read more at University of Colorado.

If it feels like you know a lot of people who are home sick, it is not your imagination. 

Health officials say there has been a surge of flu cases, and it has come with many people suffering from COVID-19 and RSV.

The flu can be deadly to adults and children. For one family, tragedy struck two decades ago, but the pain is still there, and they want people to know just how important vaccines are.

“We’ve never thought that something like this could happen to us,” said Alissa Kanowitz of Scarsdale.

Read more at CBS.

As the United States heads into the colder weather months, cases of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) have been ticking up across the country.

For the week ending Nov. 25, there were 8,863 positive RSV tests recorded, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is typical for this time of year.

This is slightly down from the previous week, when 9,914 tests were recorded and compared to last year when 16,067 positive tests were recorded during the same period.

Although most cases of RSV result in mild illness, the virus can be dangerous among infants and young children as well as senior citizens.

Read more at ABC.

With the holiday season underway, and families and friends gathering to celebrate, a leading Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s pediatrician has one word of advice for parents: Vaccinate.

Shervin Rabizadeh, MD, chair of Pediatrics at Cedars-Sinai Guerin Children’s, says vaccinating your child helps protect the whole family, including elderly grandparents.

“Vaccines are critical in preventing transmission of the virus that causes COVID-19, especially during upcoming holiday gatherings,” Rabizadeh  said. “You want to prevent and stop passage of the virus between individuals, and kids are often the vectors. They are the petri dishes that pass things on, so this [vaccination] is a great means of prevention.”

Read more at Cedars Sinai.