With summer days waning, doctors are urging people to get their flu, COVID and other vaccinations early this year.
Dr. Austin Williams at Kettering Health Medical Group in Middletown says getting the shots in September or October is the best way to avoid a post-pandemic surge in respiratory illnesses.
"The last cold and flu season we had was pretty gnarly, for lack of a better word," he says. "We were quarantined, we stayed inside, the flu and RSV and all of these other viruses that usually circulate in the winter didn't get much of a foothold. And then they were back with a vengeance. So it's a good idea to get ahead of the game on that."
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Health experts say you should expect COVID numbers to climb as the fall season comes. Williams says it's important to get your vaccines and boosters against the illness, especially in light of a new subvariant of Omicron called Eris making the rounds. But he's also confident that immunity will keep the disease from its previous levels of disruption. It's unclear exactly how bad COVID season will be, but Williams says the wave likely won't be nearly as big as it was during the height of the pandemic.
"I think we are out of the range where 2020 is going to happen again," he says. "You are going to see a surge. You're going to see cases go up; potentially hospitalizations go up. The difference being that now we have the vaccines, and we have medications that we know reduce the severity of illness in COVID."
Add the RSV vaccine to your list
There's another new vaccine that could be on your list if you're over 60. For the first time, older individuals with certain underlying respiratory vulnerabilities can get a vaccine against RSV. That's a big deal, health experts say.
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"This is not a virus that we've been able to target with a vaccine yet," Williams says. "RSV is among the most common cold viruses that circulates during the winter. So if you get sick and you feel lousy, and you go to the doctor and get tested for flu and COVID and it's neither of those things, there's a good chance it's RSV."
Data from the Centers for Disease Control suggests that RSV is responsible for as many as 160,000 hospitalizations and 10,000 deaths among older adults in the U.S. every year.