Wastewater data from San Francisco, Santa Clara and Sacramento and other Northern California communities show RSV levels are sky-high, similar to last winter’s peak in January. Scientists sampling sewage can measure the genomic material of viruses circulating in mucus, feces and urine to determine how much a bug is spreading within a community.
“There’s a really large increasing trend across all of our wastewater treatment plants that we are monitoring in the Bay Area as well as in Sacramento,” said Alexandria Boehm, who monitors the data and is a Stanford University environmental engineering professor.
The good news is most people recover from RSV in a week or two. Doctors recommend drinking lots of fluids, resting and taking medications like ibuprofen or acetaminophen to reduce fever. You can clear mucus from an infant’s nasal passage with a bulb syringe.
“If they breathe and you see the skin around their bones kind of sink in and it looks like they’re really sucking, that should certainly be a red flag to take your kid to the clinic or to the hospital,” said Dr. Ted Ruel, chief of pediatric infectious disease at UCSF.
He recommends people wash their hands frequently and stay home if they are sick. He’s also warning a nasty “tripledemic” could hit this year with flu, RSV and COVID-19 surging all at once. Ruel urges people to get a flu shot and stay current on coronavirus vaccines.
Current COVID-19 rates have been decreasing and flattened in the Bay Area, but experts say a winter wave is likely. New omicron variants are circulating in Germany and France, and European surges have been harbingers of what’s to come in California.
“We are absolutely worried about overlaps of all three viruses colliding at the same time,” said Ruel. “I think we’re still in the watch-and-see phase.”
