European countries see early signs of autumn COVID-19 rise

Health officials in the United Kingdom and the European region as a whole are seeing early signs of rising COVID activity, patterns that US experts closely watch as a harbinger of how the next months might unfold.Disease modeling experts have warned of a rise in infections in Northern Hemisphere countries as cooler weather brings more people indoors, as schools resume, and as vaccine protection wanes.UK sees rises in hospitalization, positive testsIn Britain, Susan Hopkins, MBBCh, chief medical officer at the Health Security Agency, in a statement yesterday said COVID-19 rates are still low, but data from the past 7 days shows a rise in hospitalizations and a rise in positive tests reported from the community."For those eligible, the time to get your autumn booster is now.

Getting a booster will give your immune system time to build up your protection against being severely ill from COVID-19 as we move into winter," she said.Virologists are closely monitoring steady diversification in the Omicron variant.

The BA.5 subvariant is still dominant, but scientists have identified new sublineages that have mutations that might allow them to partly escape immunity from BA.5-induced immunity.Thomas Peacock, PhD, a virologist at Imperial College London, told the London-based Guardian that BA.2.75.2 and BQ.1.1 still account for less than 0.5% of sequenced sample in the United Kingdom, but they are growing fast.

Peacock said a fall and winter COVID wave could be driven by a mixture of variants.In a snapshot of COVID activity in the European region, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said it has observed increasing transmission over the past 2 weeks.