According to Rospotrebnadzor, the incidence of influenza and SARS in the second week of January increased by 53 percent and approached 900,000 infected per day.
Photo: Valery ZVONAREV
According to Rospotrebnadzor, the incidence of influenza and SARS in the second week of January increased by 53 percent and approached 900,000 infected per day. Experts speak of an unprecedented epidemic of respiratory infections in the last five years. And then there’s the most contagious variant of the Kraken coronavirus to date that has arrived in Russia. Allergist-immunologist Vladimir Bolibok told KP.RU how the flu, SARS and Kraken coronavirus will behave in the near future.
The doctor explains the increase in cases by the fact that after the New Year holidays people began to seek medical help, and the jump in statistics shows, as it were, a pent-up demand.
– Everyone sat at home and was calmly sick, did not go to work, school or kindergarten. Therefore, the incidence was artificially low. The dynamics became visible as soon as people returned to their daily activities, they began to call doctors and go to polyclinics, says Vladimir Bolibok.
We do not have prerequisites for the incidence of influenza to increase significantly at the end of the month, the expert believes.
– The flu epidemic in the country has been going on for the third month, and the flu has nowhere to spread further. All who entered the transmission channels of influenza infection were caught, recovered, and acquired immunity to this season’s influenza viruses. Now, at the tail of the epidemic, we will see that influenza B will begin to prevail, and not influenza A (non-swine and epidemic – ed.), but this will be a victory in percentage, and not quantitative terms.
SARS will continue to spread, especially as the flu will lose ground. This includes respiratory syncytial virus, rhinovirus, adenovirus, myxovirus, and various other viruses, of which there are more than 60.
– The variant of the Kraken coronavirus, a sharp increase in incidence, as we saw in February of last year, when 200,000 people were getting sick a day, will not give. This is a hybrid of two varieties of “Omicron” and, one way or another, we have partial cross-immunity of the cell type, the doctor believes. – So, we will get infected with the Kraken, but in such a way that, in many cases, a person was infected and suffered from this infection asymptomatically. At the peak of the Kraken’s spread, according to statistics, the incidence will not exceed 50 thousand people per day, but will be around 20 thousand.
