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While possible, it’s unlikely BA.5 will keep circulating over the next few months as the population builds up immunity against the subvariant. It’s more likely that a new variant or subvariant of omicron will emerge as the virus attempts to bypass that immunity and infect as many people as it can.
 

Experts say that interacting with other infected people will unlikely make your COVID-19 infection longer or worse. But this doesn’t mean that you should fill up your social calendar while you’re trying to recover from the virus.
 

Vaccine supply is limited, distribution has run into roadblocks, and it has proven difficult to prioritize the highest-risk individuals for shots. The result is that, at least in certain areas, demand is overwhelming available supply.
 

Experts are tracking a collision of high influenza and COVID-19 cases in countries like Australia, where winter has already arrived. The country is already in winter and the caseloads there could be a harbinger of things to come this fall and winter in the U.S.
 

The boom in home testing for the coronavirus has meant that health officials never hear about many COVID cases, deflating official counts.
 

Proponents argue that this kind of data is crucial for understanding — and preventing — pandemics. But critics say that scientists should not run experiments that might make viruses better able to spread among people, given the small but real chance that these altered pathogens might infect lab workers and escape into the outside world.
 

Facing yet another COVID-19 variant, this one said to be faster and stealthier than those before it, health officials say the calculus has changed and are urging booster shots even more strongly to buck up the country’s armor.
Anna Durbin and David Dowdy are quoted. 

Experts broadly agree states shouldn’t order more doses than they think they’ll use. But they worry the low demand in states such as Alabama and Mississippi is a warning sign of the widening ambivalence among many parents about the benefits of vaccinating children against the virus and continuing politicization of health care.
 

While people have been relying on their vaccinations and antibodies from previous infections, experts say those factors offer limited protection against the BA.5 variant. President Biden’s administration is urging Americans to get boosted and take advantage of antiviral treatments. 
 

Omicron BA.5 symptoms remain similar to those of earlier Omicron subvariants. Some people reported having meningitis-like symptoms during the course of their COVID-19 illness, but there is no evidence that BA.5 is the cause.
 

In the early days of the pandemic, reinfections were reported as a rare phenomenon. Now it’s clear they are an inevitable fact of pandemic life—especially with new, more transmissible, increasingly immune-evading variants evolving on the regular.
 

Around the country, healthcare systems are under strain with COVID and influenza case numbers climbing. Experts review what’s happening in Australia and how it could help predict what’s to come in the Northern Hemisphere.