Runny noses and congestion are a fixture of the winter months \u2014 but a respiratory infection in August when you\u2019re counting on soaking up rays by Barton Springs? That just feels wrong.<\/p>\n
Yet it\u2019s not uncommon for patients to come in asking about a \u201csummer cold\u201d going around Austin, said Dr. Michael Stefanowicz, associate chief medical officer at CommUnityCare Health Centers<\/a>. It\u2019s even been a recent topic of intrigue on the Austin subreddit<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat this is, in fact, is likely a confluence of different kinds of infections that may have a seasonal pattern at times \u2014 yes, COVID being one of them,\u201d Stefanowicz said.<\/p>\n When it comes to respiratory symptoms like cough, runny nose, headache and sore throat, there are a lot of viral and bacterial infections that can be the culprit. In Central Texas, you can\u2019t rule out pollen either.<\/p>\n Dr. Tina Philip, a primary care doctor in Round Rock, said she’s seen an uptick in sore throat in particular at her practice over the past few weeks. She’s seen positive tests for COVID and even some isolated flu cases this summer \u2014 but she said often patients aren’t testing positive for anything specific.<\/p>\n “There definitely are a lot of viral illnesses that are floating around,” Philip said.<\/p>\n Traditionally, cold and flu activity tend to pick up during the fall and winter. But COVID-19 doesn\u2019t necessarily follow the same pattern. Over the last several years, COVID activity has peaked in both the summer and winter months.<\/p>\n Heather Cooks-Sinclair, chief epidemiologist for Austin Public Health, said that seasonal pattern is something that public health professionals are still working to understand. After all, it’s only been around since 2019. It takes several years for a novel disease to settle into predictable patterns, she said.<\/p>\n \u201cWe’re talking really three years of data to really kind of get trends, and that’s just not enough information to really get a good feel for what our year-to-year trends are going to be for that disease,” Cooks-Sinclair said. <\/p>\n With more folks testing at home for COVID-19 \u2014 and fewer folks testing overall \u2014 public health leaders aren\u2019t able to track positivity rates for the illness as closely as they used to. However, they can get a pretty good idea of how much COVID there is in a community by tracking the presence of the disease in local wastewater.<\/p>\n As of Aug. 9, data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention<\/a> show very high levels of COVID-19 in Texas wastewater. Specific wastewater sites in Travis County and Hays County also showed very high levels. By contrast, data from the Texas Epidemic Public Health Institute<\/a> show low levels of COVID-19 in wastewater \u2014 but that data is less up-to-date, ending on July 21. Austin Public Health, which often relies on the TEPHI data, said it is investigating the discrepancy between the two reports.<\/p>\n