the nurses strike may be ending at a significant time for the state New Jersey Health officials warn covid-19 cases have been slowly rising over the last couple of weeks and they expect the trend to continue throughout the winter just shy of 500 people in the state are hospitalized for the virus according to New Jersey's Health Department it's also the first major uptick in new Corona virus cases seen Nationwide in months with another new variant driving the rise in infections the World Health Organization is calling this strain one to watch here to explain why is Montclair State University epidemiologist Stephanie Silvera Stephanie thanks for coming in to talk about this uh new variant which the World Health Organization says is one to watch and yet it seems to be following the same path that other variants went is it more aggressive so I think it does have a little bit of an advantage over the strains that have been circulating and so we're seeing this quickly become on its track to become the dominant variant that said there's no good data at this point to indicate that it's more dangerous in terms of hospitalizations hospitalizations are ticking up but that's also to be expected after the holidays we've seen this pattern before yeah so this new strain is called pirola uh we won't get into all the digits and numbers after it if it doesn't cause more severe disease how does it differ from what we've seen in the past so I think what we are seeing is simply a case of there are more people getting sick and therefore as a result a certain proportion of those individuals are going to become hospitalized so I think that if you're an individual who's over 65 who have coor comorbid conditions you do need to be concerned and you do need to do what you can to protect yourself especially as we go into the holiday season what's the efficacy of this latest vaccine folks who are now sort of in the rhythm of getting regularly boosted and those who are not what do they need to know about it so the current booster which was formulated for one of those long letters xbb 1115 does seem to offer protection against this variant the problem is not a lot of people are getting boosted at this point and so our overall level of immunity is a little bit lower the big concern with this variant is as usual there's a subvariant and once those recombine which seems to be happening in Europe that's where we can lose some of that immune protection so and viruses rather love to mutate so we shouldn't be surprised by that but what should we anticipate for the winter months in the last couple of years we've had a lot of talk about this triple demic is that what we're looking at again so I think that we do need to be concerned about the impact that Co has on our immune systems and what we have seen is that individuals who get sick with covid are more likely to then U be susceptible to things like flu or RSV or even just the common cold and so because our immune system is under attack and we're busy fighting covid you're less able to fight off some of these other illnesses so anything we can do to stop the spread of respiratory illness helps across the board so pretty much the same practices that we've now all gotten used to as soon as the cold weather months hit absolutely so as much as possible if you can meet Outdoors keep windows open improve ventilation and I think one of the really important things is if you feel sick stay home right as much as you are capable just don't spread what you have whether it's co or flu to anybody else when we look ATU blue and RSV rates is it about where we expect it to be because there was a pretty heavy onset it seemed uh in the fall as far as data goes and it appears anyway uh with RSV that it's leveling off yeah I think that that's what we're seeing and I think we're getting back into what are the more typical RSV and flu patterns that we saw preco they were all thrown off during covid because our behaviors were different and I think we're getting back to a more um typical cyclical pattern some sense of normaly if we can say that as much as we can have yes Dr Stephanie Silvera thanks so much thank [Music] you