Wash Your Hands and Pray You Don’t Get Sick

In one very specific and mostly benign way, it’s starting to feel a lot like the spring of 2020: Disinfection is back.

“Bleach is my friend right now,” says Annette Cameron, a pediatrician at Yale School of Medicine, who spent the first half of this week spraying and sloshing the potent chemical all over her home. It’s one of the few tools she has to combat norovirus, the nasty gut pathogen that her 15-year-old son was recently shedding in gobs.

Right now, hordes of people in the Northern Hemisphere are in a similarly crummy situation. In recent weeks, norovirus has seeded outbreaks in several countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and the . Last week, the U.K. Health Security Agency that laboratory than what’s typical this time of year. Especially hard-hit are Brits 65 and older, who are falling ill at rates that “haven’t been seen in over a decade.”