Preparing for the 2023 Tripledemic
As autumn descends upon us, the Nation's attention is turning to cold and flu season, along with a formidable “tripledemic” that’s attacking Americans and especially our children and elderly: the flu, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and a new highly contagious variant of Covid-19, called BA.2.86.
Contributing to this tripledemic is the fact that ~60% of children aged 6 months to 17 years are unvaccinated against the flu, and a staggering 90% of children aged 6 months to 4 years haven’t received a Covid vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The need for an orchestrated vaccine effort couldn’t be more urgent as flu and RSV season, traditionally striking in October. RSV causes approximately 80,000 infant hospitalizations each year alone. The CDC estimates that during this flu season, there were at least 26 million illnesses, 290,000 hospitalizations, and 19,000 deaths from flu.
COVID hospitalizations rose in the U.S. for the sixth consecutive week, 15,067 hospitalizations were recorded for the week ending Aug. 19, with a 19% increase in hospitalizations year on year throughout August, according to the CDC and hospitalization and wastewater surveillance data.
Couple this with the new Covid variant and it’s predicted that the US healthcare system will experience a significant strain this fall, notes Vanderbilt University Medical Center infectious disease expert Dr. William Schaffner.
“We’re going to have to learn how to deliver those vaccines in a way that’s effective in actually reaching the population at a time when there’s already vaccine fatigue,” he said. All this, as health professionals are still reeling from last year’s RSV surge that struck young children and babies born during lockdown who got their first exposure to the virus.
The bigger issue is limited outbreak surveillance capabilities: not enough people are getting tested for Covid-19 or reporting their results, opening up risks of an even greater outbreak . As virologist and USF Health associate professor Dr. Michael Teng explains, wastewater surveillance offers valuable data but is by no means comprehensive.
SmartTracker CEO Jose Duenas has taken this challenge head on with the launch of a no-code public health platform enabling State, County and City health agencies to set up community health programs within days. The platform can also aggregate and track health data in real time and share data with neighboring agencies.
In the battle against the tripledemic, that means health agencies can now launch mass vaccine events on demand and better triangulate the spread of viral outbreaks as they’re happening.
At a time when Americans are being urged to get three (3) separate vaccines this Fall for Covid, RSV, and the flu – a logistical nightmare for patients and healthcare professionals alike – SmartTracker is empowering public health officials with a viable strategy to administer and track mass vaccinations, as well as other specialized treatments like nirsevimab (marketed as Beyfortus), a novel long-acting monoclonal antibody approved by the CDC in treating infants younger than 8 months and higher-risk children up to 19 months old.
For more info on how officials can accelerate your immunization program, contact SmartTracker at info@smarttracker.health.
