Many respiratory virus illnesses peak during the winter due to environmental conditions and human behaviors. COVID-19 has peaks in the winter and also at other times of the year, including the summer. This is driven in part by new variants and decreasing immunity from previous infections and vaccinations.
CDC's respiratory virus guidance has steps you can take to protect yourself and others from COVID-19 this summer.
The rapid test is the latest scientific advancement against bird flu and comes from Alveo Technologies Inc. (California), a leader in molecular sensing and diagnostics with a proprietary technology platform.
The first step in combating any infectious disease outbreak is detection. Without widespread testing, health officials have little sense of who is infected, when to treat patients and how to monitor their close contacts.
In that sense, the bird flu outbreak plaguing the nation’s dairy farms is spreading virtually unobserved.
As of Monday, the virus had infected 157 herds in 13 states. But while officials have tested thousands of cows and are monitoring hundreds of farmworkers, only about 60 people have been tested for bird flu.
