Epidemiologist David Dowdy says vaccines and a preventive drug for RSV offer hope for a healthier fall and winter this year.

Last year’s “tripledemic” of flu, COVID-19, and RSV left many of us wary of what the coming respiratory virus season might bring.

This year’s landscape is already different, however, with new vaccines and treatments, like the game-changing antibody that protects kids from RSV, offering new ways to tamp down infections and transmission.

In this Q&A, adapted from the July 28 episode of Public Health On Call, Dowdy, a professor in the epidemiology department at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, discusses what we can learn from last year’s virus season, how and why this year might be different, and why vaccinations continue to play a key role in determining how severe the viruses’ toll will be:

Last year we saw a big respiratory virus season after a couple of years of not seeing as much flu and RSV. Should we be worried about another difficult season this year?

I think people have reason to be on edge. The COVID pandemic threw us all for a loop.

Last year, we did have quite a large spike in RSV, and the flu season was earlier but not necessarily worse than usual. It’s hard to know exactly what’s going to happen this year, but given that COVID hospitalizations and deaths are at all-time lows, and people are getting back to behaving as they did before the pandemic, I think we’re likely to get back to the way things used to be with respiratory viruses as well.

We don’t know for sure what’s going to happen. But we don’t have any evidence to strongly suggest that things are going to be much, much worse this coming year than they were pre-pandemic.

We’ve seen some reports of an uptick of COVID in some wastewater surveillance. What’s going on here?

We are seeing a slight uptick in wastewater surveillance, but it’s important to couch that in the probably more meaningful data on hospitalizations and deaths being at an all-time low. Both of the last two years, we saw a noticeable summer peak in COVID admissions and deaths. We really aren’t seeing that at all this summer, for the first time since the start of the pandemic. So I think that’s overall good news. So people may still be getting sick, but they’re not getting really sick.

Read the full article about flu season at Futurity.