The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said health departments across the country are seeing an increase in respiratory illnesses, including the flu, RSV and a fast-growing new COVID-19 variant called JN.1.
WTOP anchors Shawn Anderson and Kyle Cooper spoke with CBS News medical contributor Dr. Celine Gounder on the trend and what to know about the latest variant.
Read the interview transcript below, which has been lightly edited for clarity.
Shawn Anderson: So let’s first talk about this latest COVID variant. Is it showing the same symptoms as other variants for those who get infected?
Dr. Celine Gounder: The kind of COVID you get with JN.1, this current variant, the symptoms are the same. So it’s going to be that typical fever, cough, perhaps in some people shortness of breath, sore throat, but the symptoms are the same. And it’s really important for people to understand that you’re going to hear about variant after variant after variant emerging. And it’s not necessarily really big news, unless that variant is seen to be escaping your immunity, if it’s transmitting from person-to-person a lot more efficiently. And if it’s leading to more people ending up in the hospital than with prior variants, and we’re just not seeing that with this current one. It’s behaving like other recent COVID variants.
Kyle Cooper: Of course, we’ve been reporting that flu and RSV cases are also up. But there’s also some anecdotal reporting out there that some urgent care doctors are seeing lots and lots of people with some type of virus that doesn’t necessarily test positive for COVID or anything else. Is that just a run-of-the mill kind of winter virus that so many people are getting these days?
Celine Gounder: There are hundreds of respiratory viruses; we don’t test for all of them. Currently, the ones we test for most frequently are the flu, COVID and RSV, because those are the three that get people the sickest, that are most likely to land you in the hospital and to kill you. But there are many, many others. And we just don’t always test for them. So sometimes it’s a little bit hard to know which of those others it might be.
Shawn Anderson: Curious about this, did anything happen with the average immune system during the pandemic that now makes it maybe harder to fight off a cold or some other virus?
Celine Gounder: Well, we were social distancing, we were wearing masks. And so for people who were doing that they were less exposed to other viruses. It’s not that your immune system was made weaker per se, but just that it wasn’t seeing those typical seasonal viruses during the period of the pandemic as much as it might have. And so now you’re getting exposed to things that you hadn’t been exposed to before. And you are perhaps getting sick all at once. Kind of like when you send a kid to preschool. They come home with cold after cold after cold. It’s kind of like that what you’re seeing now and in adults.
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