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The most recent variant, KP.3, accounts for most new cases in Canada.
“It’s very, very contagious, that’s why we see a lot of cases at the moment,” explained Dr. Nicholas Brousseau, a public health physician at Quebec’s National Public Health Institute (INSPQ). “But it is not more severe than other variants, so the level of hospitalization is not so high.”
Emergency rooms have been over capacity for the past month, but COVID-19 is only one of many factors causing the backlog.
The new surge in cases is linked to summer gatherings and travel.
“If you don’t want to get sick on vacation, you might have to take some preventative measures, like wearing a mask on a plane,” epidemiologist Dr. Christopher Labos said.
Some may want to consider getting vaccinated in the fall, when infections are expected to rise as children go back to school.
The INSPQ highly recommends that vulnerable people receive a booster shot. That includes seniors, long-term care home residents, immunocompromised or chronically ill people, and health-care workers.
“For young, healthy adults, the risk of hospitalization or severe illness is very low,” Brousseau added. “It’s more of an individual decision.”
All currently available vaccines are equally effective, experts say. However, Brousseau recommends waiting for “the updated vaccine, because a new vaccine is in development that will be adapted to the COVID-19 strain that is circulating at the moment.”
Labos says that as long as vaccines only target the spikes of the virus, there will be new waves of infections.
“If you could make it so that it was targeting a part of the virus that doesn’t mutate,” he explained,” it would be stable no matter what variant came up.”
