Here are the latest national Covid-19 trends, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and major wastewater surveillance providers:
- About 0.6 in every 100,000 people was hospitalized for Covid-19 during the week ending May 11. (Note that these are provisional data.)
- Covid-19 test positivity has decreased 3%, from 3.3% of Covid-19 tests returning positive results during the week ending May 4 to 3.2% of tests during the week ending May 11.
- Healthcare visits for influenza-like illness have decreased 4% between the week ending May 4 and the week ending May 11, and these visits are below the baseline for respiratory virus season.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has increased 3% between the week ending May 4 and the week ending May 11, and the national wastewater viral activity level is minimal, per the CDC.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has increased 19% between May 6 and May 13, per WastewaterSCAN.
Following last week’s trends, U.S. Covid-19 metrics continue to indicate that we may be at the beginning of a summer surge, thanks to our lack of collective safety measures combined with the latest variants. Unfortunately, the U.S. just lost another set of Covid-19 metrics, as wastewater surveillance company Biobot Analytics announced that it is shutting down its public dashboard.
Our remaining two major wastewater surveillance dashboards, run by the CDC and WastewaterSCAN, both report that SARS-CoV-2 levels are starting to increase nationwide after two months of declines. The CDC reports a very slight increase (3%) while WWSCAN reports a greater increase (19%), but both indicate the West Coast is seeing more virus spread than other regions.
WWSCAN’s coronavirus levels, which benchmark recent virus measurements and trends against past measurements from the same region, label the U.S. overall as “medium” SARS-CoV-2 levels and the West as “high.” The CDC continues to label the country as “minimal” through its own wastewater levels, which, I’ve previously noted, appear to label virus spread that still contributes to thousands of infections each day as “no big deal.”
Covid-19 test positivity, from the CDC’s network of labs reporting PCR results, has gone back down slightly from its increase last week; these are differences of 0.1%, which is tough to interpret. Walgreens’ test positivity dashboard (which reports results from tests conducted by the pharmacy chain) shows increases over the last two weeks.
Hospitalizations, from our now-less-comprehensive (but still delayed) CDC source, continue to be very low, reporting less than one person hospitalized with Covid-19 for every 100,000 U.S. residents. The CDC didn’t provide updated variant estimates this week, but it did report new estimates of how many Americans have had Long Covid: over 5% of U.S. adults were currently experiencing the disease this April.
Shortly after losing comprehensive Covid-19 data from hospitals, we’ve now lost another major data source as Biobot sunsetted its popular wastewater surveillance dashboard. In a Twitter/X thread explaining this decision, the Biobot team explained that the CDC’s wastewater dashboard now offers a potential replacement for people seeking to continue following Covid-19 trends. To me, the team also seemed to imply that the CDC has more resources to keep up this public communications work than Biobot, a small start-up; it reminded me of the Covid Tracking Project (where I was a volunteer) sunsetting in spring 2021.
While it’s true that the CDC dashboard now offers national, regional, and state-level trends following its upgrade this past winter, I would personally argue that Biobot’s dashboard provided much-needed consistency and longevity. Biobot’s national data went back earlier in the pandemic than the CDC’s and offered helpful context as our baseline between surges crept higher and higher. I’m sorry to see this dashboard end, but I send thanks to everyone at Biobot who worked on this valuable public resource.
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