Alabama
A wave of summertime COVID is here. The Alabama Department of Public Health said there’s been some evidence of high Covid levels recently. Dr. Wes Stubblefield, a medical officer with ADPH, said that current COVID numbers appear to be climbing.
And some parts of the US have seen some growths in the number of hospitalizations and the number of positive tests that are being registered regionally. He continued by saying that there has been evidence that there’s been some kind of summertime COVID wave.
Alaska
Alaska seems to have also experienced a summer rise in COVID levels, fueled by the new so-called “FLiRT variants,” new Omicron variants of the COVID-19 virus.
Joe McLaughlin, an epidemiologist with the state’s division of public health, said the wave is partially due to waning immunity. He noted that only approximately 18% of Alaskans got a COVID-19 vaccine this past year.
He went on to explain that anytime we see these variants that are driving the wave, generally, what’s happening is that they’ve gone through some kind of a mutation, at least one, that typically will give them the capability to evade prior immunity better than other strains that are circulating around.
