It sucks when viruses aren’t dumb. Unfortunately, COVID is like a big old cockroach that just can’t be killed. It just keeps morphing and morphing. I mean how many boosters does a girl have to get?

Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash
Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash
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Of course, I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, especially when we are trying to kick off a brand new year but there is another variant (kind of like omicron’s crappy cousin). It is an Omicron sublineage called XBB.1.5. This offshoot is responsible for almost all new COVID cases in New Jersey according to the Asbury Park Patch’s reporting on the latest CDC data.

This one has 72.2 percent of COVID illness as of just last week. Holiday gatherings did not help matters. This one is really tricky because it is a master mutator. This makes our vaccines less able to protect us but the vaccines still greatly help the severity and intensity of the illness.

We got triple-walloped between this new COVID spin-off, the flu, and RSV all happening at the same time. This one spreads much more easily as well. I did not know that it is really damaging to keep getting COVID over and over. In fact, if you keep getting it, it can lead to a significant long-term risk of organ failure.

Epidemiologist Dr. Aiyad Al-Aly says,

Without ambiguity, our research showed that getting an infection a second, third or fourth time contributes to additional healing risks in the acute phase, meaning the first 30 days after infection, and in the month beyond, meaning the long COVID phase.

Getting vaccinated, although not a sure thing, will really help drop our hospitalization and death rates according to the CDC.

In addition to getting boosted, here are some important ways to keep our bodies strong.

KEEP READING: See 25 natural ways to boost your immune system

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