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Whooping cough cases are up sixfold from the same time last year in the U.S., affecting states ranging from Pennsylvania and New York on the East Coast to Wisconsin and Ohio in the Midwest and California and Washington out west.
Experts say the spike in cases is likely a return to the pre-pandemic cycle, in which cases of the illness would ebb and flow about every five years. But, some experts worry that a decline in vaccine uptake in the past several years could set this season to be more severe.
“It’s a big year, no doubt, but I don’t think it’s dramatically bigger than big years before the pandemic,” said Mark Sawyer, a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego. But, he added, “it’s a very, very contagious infection, so once it gets going, it does spread among susceptible people, and we may have built up a bigger susceptible population than we usually did.”
Whooping cough is a bacterial infection known as pertussis, marked by a distinctive cough that can sound like “whoop.” The disease is often underdiagnosed or misdiagnosed because it can be confused with other respiratory infections.
Cases of the disease went down during the pandemic because people were social distancing and masking. This year, the CDC has recorded around 25,000 cases of pertussis, according to its most recent data. That’s well below the worst years of pertussis before the pandemic, but several times higher compared to the height of the pandemic. Cases fell to their lowest at around 2,100 in 2021.
