season directly opposite in our, they have a particularly bad flu season this year, when doesn t necessarily guarantee we will have a bad one, but strongly suggestive we may well have a severe influence season, again another indication why we could get our flu convenience and the updated ba.5, bivalent covid vaccine. there s no reason not to do that. if you look at the numbers of severities of hospitalization and death when you compare vaccinated or unvaxated, or even vaccinated without a boost, the vaccinated with the updated boosts do much, much better when it comes to hospitalizations and deaths. i m curious what about when it comes to masking.
booster previously. the answer to that is two months. and then even more confusion about the timing. if you had an infection recently. and i ve been telling patient that s they need to at least recover from their infection and i d love to see it about two months from their infection. but don t wait too long. this updated booster can protect you, to your point, for winter surge, for variant that s are probably close to the ba 5 variant but no the exactly like ba 5. we re seeing evidence of that in the united states and other countries where we could see the variant that s could pierce that immunity. even from ba 4 and 5. so that combined with jonathan what i think is a record number of pediatric infections in the hospitals, not covid but importantly enough related to rsv, respiratory viruses, we ll have a health system overloaded with what we don t know what. all the more reason to get a booster. it will be available for 5-11, by the way. in a matter of weeks.