BALTIMORE — Between the Wednesday rain and the unhealthy heat, it’s been tough to enjoy the outdoors lately. As we push through a July heat wave, a lot more Marylanders are gathering indoors.
“We just had a week to ten days of hot weather; it’s the next week or two we should start to really pay attention to the COVID numbers to see if that results in an increase here,” Dr. Andrew Pekosz, a virologist with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told WMAR.
COVID numbers are increasing in many parts of the US; the disease captured national headlines again after a Wednesday announcement from the White House that President Joe Biden tested positive.
READ MORE: President Biden’s COVID-19 comes amid an increase in viral activity in wastewater
As necessary as it is to keep folks cool as temperatures increase in Maryland, more gathering inside could bring about more illness, Pekosz explained.
“Instead of being outside, people are staying inside,” Pekosz added.
“People are turning on fans; they’re air conditioning at fairly high levels. Sometimes those air flows generated by fans and by air conditioners are not ideal for limiting respiratory virus transmission.”
“I imagine we’ve got two things coming together,” Pekosz said. “People getting inside because of the hot weather, and a more transmissible variant around. Those two things are probably working together to cause an increase in COVID cases in some parts of the country.”
On Wednesday, Pekosz told WMAR local COVID is ‘pretty stable;’ for the vast majority of people, Pekosz points out COVID is much milder than it was even a year or two ago. However, we are still seeing Marylanders in hospitals with it, and a select few, mostly at high risk, are dying.
“COVID-19 is still a serious disease to some parts of the population, and I think this is where all of us have to think about ways where we could collectively minimize the risk to that small but very vulnerable part of our population,” continued Pekosz.
At the end of May, 45 people statewide were in the hospital and positive for the disease. In mid-July, 119 people were, according to state data.
Hospitalizations can be tracked easily, but with less testing and reporting among the general population, Pekosz says, “When we see a surge of cases that are particularly mild, it’s much less likely that we’ll pick up on that early.”
“We’ll always be able to keep track of who’s getting very sick, and how they’re behaving and how those numbers are looking. We just won’t know accurately how many total cases there are,” Pekosz explained.
“And that’s important because hospitalization rates, death rates, emergency room visit rates are all depending on knowing something about the total number of case that are out there. Otherwise, you just sort of get a number, and you don’t know what it means overall in terms of the total number of cases that are here.”
Right now, COVID is not pushing our hospitals past capacity, but it could still leave you couch-bound. Pekosz said to stay home if you’re not well and to have a few COVID tests on hand, especially as we go into the autumn.
At the end of June, the CDC announced recommendations for updated vaccines for the fall and winter season.