Health experts are urging community members to exercise greater caution and mask up as Pasadena and the rest of Los Angeles County deal with a sharp increase in COVID-19 cases driven in large part by a highly contagious new variant.
This variant, KP.3.1.1, is causing a surge, especially among those who have previously avoided the virus. Experts attribute the rise to the variant’s increased transmissibility and its abilities to evade some immune defenses, combined with a general decline in immunity within the population.
“In the last few weeks, we, meaning L.A. County, including Pasadena, have seen an increase in the total number of SARS COV-2 cases being reported in our laboratories, but also in our wastewater detection,” Dr. Matt Feaster, division manager of Epidemiology and Disease Control in the Pasadena Public Health Department, said Monday, Aug. 5.
This reflects the general trend in the area. Last week, the level of coronavirus particles in wastewater, a proxy of COVID-19 cases in a community, rose to 44% of last winter’s peak, more than double the 17% reported in the first week of July, the LA County Public Health Department said in an emailed statement Monday.
Currently, L.A. County’s wastewater coronavirus concentration is around 82% of last summer’s peak, which took place in early September. Over the past four weeks, the daily average of COVID-19 cases, deaths and hospitalizations have doubled. Last week, LA County reported an average of 452 daily COVID-19 cases, up from 229 cases four weeks ago, county officials said.
Pasadena has seen an average of around five reported cases per day, Feaster said. However, this is likely a “big underestimate” of the actual number of infections in the community, because it only includes those who have taken a PCR test, and exclude those using at-home tests or who haven’t tested, both of which go unreported, he said.
The recent rise in COVID-19 cases are caused in part by the new variant KP.3.1.1, an off-shoot of Omicron, Dr. Elizabeth Hudson, regional chief of infectious diseases at Kaiser Permanente Southern California, headquartered in Pasadena, wrote in an emailed response Monday.
KP.3.1.1 has recently become the dominant variant across the country, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. KP.3.1.1 is a sublineage of KP.3, which was the previous dominant variant. Together, KP.3.1.1 and KP.3 made up 27.8% and 20.1% of Omicron cases across the country for the period of July 21 to Aug.3, CDC data shows.
“This variant is more infectious and it’s coming at a time when overall immunity, both natural and vaccine-induced, is at a nadir,” Hudson said. “This, combined with people engaging in the usual summertime activities without any mitigation techniques (very few are wearing masks), means that this variant is able to spread quickly. We are also seeing more of the so-called ‘Novids’ or those who’ve never had COVID getting it now.”
The surge is affecting people across all ages, although most do not require hospitalization, Hudson said. Those who are hospitalized tend to be older and more likely to have compromised immune systems, she added.
Both KP.3.1.1 and KP.3. belong to a new class of variant called the “FLiRT” variants, which are notable for their combination of mutations that help the virus evade antibodies while potentially improving its ability to bind to and enter cells, researchers at John Hopkins said.
“It’s in the virus’s interest to become more infectious and to dodge some of the vaccine immunity that we have out there,” Dr. Kimberly Shriner, medical director of infection prevention at Huntington Health, said in a phone interview last week. “So, as much as everybody wants the COVID pandemic to be over, it really isn’t over.”
At the time of the interview, there were 16 COVID-19 patients at the hospital, Shriner said.
“And the thing that kind of scares the heck out of me is the idea of long COVID, because that’s bad, and it’s not uncommon. It’s about 10 percent of people, especially people who’ve had it multiple times,” she said.
While the current situation is not “a time for alarm”, it is a call to action, Feaster said.
“It’s not atypical for us to see increases over the summer when people are traveling and increases in social mixing and other things that increase our risk for SARS transmission,” Feaster said. “But certainly, this is a time for us to reflect on our risk and think about what we can do to prevent transmission.”
CDC is recommending people aged six months and older to get the new COVID booster to better protect themselves against the virus, he said. The new vaccine, which will be based on the new variants, is anticipated to become available in early September, according to the CDC.
In the meantime, experts are also highly recommending people to take precautionary measures, such as washing hands often, staying home if they have any symptoms of the illness, including coughing, sneezing, a fever or sore throat, getting tested, and most importantly, wearing masks at crowded indoor spaces.
“It’s the easiest, safest, cheapest, most effective thing you can do to prevent getting not just COVID, but other respiratory diseases,” Shriner said.
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