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This is the fifth consecutive week of increasing COVID-19 hospitalizations, reaching levels not seen since the end of February. However, they remain lower than rates seen at the same time last year. ... "We think we are just at the peak [of RSV], which means we're seeing the most number of cases we expect in the season, may start to see some declines already in some of our southern and southeast states, but pretty active across the country," Dr. Mandy Cohen, CDC director, told ABC News. (Benadjaoud and Kekatos, 12/15)

Hospitals and emergency rooms could be forced to ration care by the end of this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Thursday, saying recent trends in COVID-19 and influenza are now on track to again strain America's health care system. The new COVID variant JN.1 is making up an increasing share of cases, the CDC's tracking shows."COVID-19 hospitalizations are rising quickly," the agency said in its weekly update. "Since the summer, public health officials have been tracking a rise in multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), which is caused by COVID-19. Influenza activity is growing in most parts of the country. RSV activity remains high in many areas." (Tin, 12/15)

Hospitals and emergency rooms in California and across the nation may have to ration care by the end of the month, federal health authorities warned this week. Officials are particularly worried about an insufficient number of beds for children in pediatric hospitals and wards throughout the country as respiratory illnesses hit especially hard among Americans younger than 18 years old. (Vaziri, 12/15)

As COVID-19 hospitalizations rise across large swaths of Illinois and the nation, only about 11% of Chicago residents are up to date on vaccination against the virus. The combination is concerning to many health officials as respiratory virus season amps up and the Christmas and New Year holidays approach. (Lourgos, 12/18)

The latest data show the big three respiratory illnesses – Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV), Influenza (flu) and COVID-19 — on the rise in Minnesota this week. Bed space in the state’s hospitals is in short supply. Only 36 pediatric beds and another 10 pediatric intensive care beds were available in the entire state on December 12, according to the most recent data available from the Minnesota Department of Health. This comes at a time when the number of hospital admissions for RSV went up by 44 cases in one week in the Twin Cities alone. (Helmstetter and Clary, 12/15)

The high-dose recombinant influenza vaccine offers more protection against flu than an egg-based standard-dose vaccine among adults aged 50 and 64 years, according to an observational cluster-randomized study published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers from Kaiser Permanente Northern California immunized more than 1.6 million patients aged 18 to 64 years with either the high-dose quadrivalent (four-strain) flu vaccine (Flublok; 632,962 patients) or one of two standard-dose vaccines (997,366) in the 2018-19 and 2019-20 respiratory virus seasons. They compared the effectiveness of the vaccines against infection and hospitalization. (Van Beusekom, 12/15)

A genomic analysis of SARS-CoV-2 in San Diego and Mexico reveals that physical distancing was more effective than international border closures in containing the virus. Scripps Research scientists and colleagues sequenced more than 82,000 SARS-CoV-2 samples gathered from routine genomic surveillance in San Diego and the state of Baja California, Mexico, to reconstruct viral spread dynamics from March 2020 to the end of the first Omicron surge in December 2022. (Van Beusekom, 12/15)

At least 215 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines purchased by EU countries at the height of the pandemic have since been thrown away at an estimated cost to the taxpayer of €4 billion, an analysis by POLITICO reveals. And that's almost certainly an underestimate. (Martuscelli and Cokelaere, 12/18)

U.S. drug regulators in September found quality control lapses at Moderna’s (MRNA.O) main factory including with equipment used to manufacture drug substance for its COVID-19 vaccine, according to the report obtained by Reuters via a Freedom of Information Act request. The Sept. 11-21 inspection by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration took place at Moderna’s facility in Norwood, Massachusetts, which is used to manufacture the company’s COVID shot Spikevax and an experimental mRNA cancer vaccine being developed with Merck & Co. (Wingrove, 12/15)