A New COVID Wave Is Coming. This Time You Can Do Something About It.
I keep an eye on a number most people have never heard of: how much COVID virus is showing up in Wake County’s sewage. It is the most honest early-warning signal we have. If the virus is moving through the community, it shows up in the wastewater first, usually a week or two before I see it in the office.
That number is going up. In early July, the largest treatment plant serving Raleigh was reading close to zero. By the end of August it had climbed roughly forty-fold, and every monitored plant in the county has moved in the same direction. The levels are still officially “low,” which is exactly the point. This is the part of the curve where you get to decide how your fall is going to go.
So here is what I want you to do about it in 2026.
The Wave Is Not the Problem. Getting Sick Is.
The virus circulating right now is another branch of the Omicron family, the same family we have been living with for nearly five years. The names change every few months and the news treats each one as a fresh catastrophe. Your immune system has spent years learning this virus, and for most healthy adults an infection today is a bad week, not a hospital stay.
But a bad week is still a bad week. And every infection, mild or not, is another round of inflammation, and you know how I feel about inflammation. It is the source of all evil. The goal is to let the wave pass you by.
For the past two years, my traveling patients have had a way to do that. This fall, I am handing it to everyone.
The Spray
I learned about iota-carrageenan nasal spray the way I learn about a lot of useful things: from a patient. Two years ago, a frequent flyer told me it was the reason he had stopped coming home from trips sick. I looked at the evidence, and I have been telling my traveling patients to use it on the plane ever since. I wrote it up in Staying Well at 30,000 Feet. Until now, that is where I left it: a tool for airports and airplanes. This is the first season I am telling all of you to use it, and this post is why.
Iota-carrageenan is not a drug. It is a long-chain sugar extracted from red seaweed. Sprayed into the nose, it forms a thin, moist film over the lining of your nasal passages, and that film does one thing: it physically traps virus particles before they can attach to your cells and start multiplying. The nose is where respiratory viruses land. Coat the landing strip, and they touch down on the film instead of on you.
The evidence for this is better than the evidence for most things sold in a pharmacy aisle. In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of 394 hospital workers caring for COVID patients in Argentina, the people using the spray four times a day for three weeks had an 80 percent lower rate of COVID infection than the people using plain saline. Two infections out of 196 on the spray versus ten out of 198 on placebo. These were nurses and physicians standing in COVID wards all day, not people avoiding crowds. Earlier trials in the common cold showed the same idea from the other direction: people who started the spray after symptoms began got better nearly two days sooner, carried less virus, and relapsed a third as often. The largest benefit, three to four days shorter, was in the people whose cold turned out to be caused by a coronavirus, the seasonal cousins of the one we are talking about.
For two years my patients have been using this spray on airplanes, which are about the most efficient way I know to share a virus with two hundred strangers. Not one of them has come home from a flight sick. The only failure I have seen was a patient on a cruise, sharing a cabin with a friend who was already sick, which is a harder test than I would set for any nasal spray. This is not a trial and I will not dress it up as one. It is what I have watched happen in my own practice. If it can hold up in a sealed cabin for six hours, it can hold up at the office, at church, and at school, and that is why I am writing this post now instead of after the wave.
What to Do This Week
First, get the spray now, before you need it. It is over the counter and inexpensive. The one I recommend is EPOTHEX Saline Nasal Spray with Iota-Carrageenan, which is dosed at the same 1.2 milligrams per milliliter used in the trials. Check the label if you buy a different brand. Many “seaweed” sprays on the shelf contain a different type of carrageenan, or a token amount, and those were not what was studied.
Second, use it the way it was studied. Two sprays in each nostril, up to four times a day, or before and after the situations where you breathe other people’s air: the office, church, the gym, school, a restaurant, a plane.
Third, run the rest of the protocol. I laid out the full supplement list in my BA.3.2 post and I am not going to repeat it here, but the short version is vitamin D, zinc, vitamin C, elderberry, inulin, and quercetin. These are the same things I recommend for every respiratory virus, and they work best when you are already on them before you are exposed.
Fourth, if you are in a higher-risk group, know your plan before you get sick. The antivirals we have work best in the first forty-eight hours of symptoms. If you are over sixty-five, immune-suppressed, or carrying serious heart or lung disease, and you wake up with a sore throat and a fever, do not wait to see how it goes. Test, and call the office the same day. That plan only works if the tools are already in the house. Stock three things now, while you are well: a COVID and flu combination test, a thermometer, and a pulse oximeter, the little fingertip clip that reads your oxygen level. A reading that keeps drifting down is the one sign I most want you to catch early, and it is the thing you cannot feel. I have put all three in my Amazon storefront for the sick season, alongside the spray.
Fifth, if you do get sick, keep spraying. The same film that blocks the virus from getting in also traps the virus you are shedding, which is why the cold trials found shorter illnesses and less virus. It will not cure you, but it will shorten the visit, and it makes you less likely to hand it to the rest of your household.
The Bottom Line
A wave is coming. That is not a prediction, it is a reading from the sewer. What is different this time is that you have a simple, cheap, well-studied tool to keep the virus from ever getting a foothold, and two years of my own patients, at 30,000 feet, to show it works. Get the spray this week, use it every day while the numbers are up, and let this wave be something you read about rather than something you live through.
If you have used the spray, I would like to hear how it went for you. Leave a comment below. And if you have not tried it yet, this is the season to start.
To your good health,
The Longevity Doctor®
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