We've seen a spike in new COVID 19 cases recently.

But a leading immunologist at the University of Kentucky says We've come a long way from where we were this time last year.

More in tonight's medical news.

We are in such has such a different space than we were and even last year that we've had wonderful vaccines available.

We have great antivirals.

And by this point, I think everybody has either been infected or vaccinated or both both of the cases.

Right.

So we're really different.

Different place than we were a couple of years ago.

And we did see that blip in COVID hospitalization and and cases and positivity rate come up.

But I looked at the CDC tracker this morning and it looks like we kind of peaked in that September 9th, 10th.

And it looks like maybe the numbers are actually trending down, though some metrics still are a blip than we saw before.

So because school is in full force and assembling more indoors as the weather we think is going to be cooling down.

But I think we're you know, we're in a different place.

And like I said, most people by now have had four or five vaccines and they've either on top of that gotten infected.

So they've built that natural immunity in addition to vaccine induced immunity.

So I think we're we're really in a different place.

Right.

The vaccine that is currently available, that is.

What is the difference in this vaccine that currently is available?

So the new vaccine that came out is built on one of the on the ground strains that was in circulation in November 2021 and was really the dominant variant until very recently this year.

It just it just got displaced by a couple of new variants.

As you know, as we know, this virus is still adapting and still mutating.

But it's there's lots of data coming out of laboratories right now that show that antibodies made to this new vaccine are capable of recognizing the two variants, including the most most recent variant.

Are we at herd immunity?

You know, it's really hard to quantify herd immunity, but at the same time, I think where if you took a random sampling of individuals and just looked for antibodies against either a spike or the nucleocapsid protein, you know, so the spike is the component of the vaccine.

Nucleocapsid is what you get in the real virus.

If we just went outside and just gathered, you know, 100 people, I would estimate that 80% of them would have antibodies at this point.

So we are getting really close to that.

So with each time the disease mutates, my language, layman's terms, does it get weaker?

Oh, so it's really hard to it's really hard to answer that question directly because the viruses mutating.

But at the same time, we're also acquiring immunity.

And so it is really difficult in a clinical setting to say, oh, is the virus getting weaker or are we getting stronger?

Or maybe a combination of both or some sort of.

But I think the most important thing is that we're still COVID is still by, you know, the majority of cases.

COVID is an incidental finding in hospitalizations.

We're still not seeing the numbers of people who are being admitted because they have COVID.

Mostly what we're seeing right now is that people are in the hospital and, oh, by the way, they also have COVID, which is a completely different scenario than what we experienced not that long ago.

Yeah, even the hospitalization spike that you mentioned that we did experience was nowhere near to where we were just this time last year, let alone a couple of years ago.

For those who have a question about so many places, workplaces or pharmacies are saying you can get your flu shot and your COVID shot at the same time.

Some people might might be nervous about that.

What do you say?

Well, I tell them that trust your immune system is very capable of handling more than one vaccine.

In fact, if you remember, if if any of us have, you know, our parents or grandparents or uncles, but we all have a child in our family, we took them to the pediatrician and loaded them up with six vaccines in one visit.

So if if a kid with a six month old can handle getting all those all those shots at the same time, I think we can handle getting two shots at the same time.

So join us tomorrow because Dr. Massoud Powers will join us again and we'll talk about a different respiratory virus that particularly impacts kids.

RSV.