Here are the latest national Covid-19 trends, according to the CDC and major wastewater surveillance providers:
- New hospital admissions with Covid-19 have decreased 6%, from 3,300 admissions per day during the week ending January 27 to 3,000 admissions per day during the week ending February 3.
- Test positivity has decreased 6%, from 10.6% of Covid-19 tests returning positive results during the week ending January 27 to 10% of tests during the week ending February 3.
- Healthcare visits for influenza-like illness have increased 3% between the week ending January 27 and the week ending February 3.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has decreased 14% between the week ending January 27 and the week ending February 3, and the national wastewater viral activity level is high, per the CDC.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has increased 2% between February 3 and February 10, per Biobot Analytics.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has decreased 19% between January 29 and February 5, per WastewaterSCAN.
While Covid-19 is clearly still spreading at high rates across the U.S., data sources are giving us mixed signals as to whether transmission is going up or down. Wastewater surveillance suggests transmission may be increasing in some places and decreasing in others, while healthcare system data show continued, but slow, declines in severe acute Covid-19 cases.
Biobot Analytics, which currently provides the most up-to-date national wastewater trends, suggests that SARS-CoV-2 levels have been in a plateau for the last couple of weeks after decreasing throughout January. The CDC’s and WastewaterSCAN’s dashboards, in slight contrast, report transmission going down, albeit more slowly than the sharp declines we saw in January.
As I wrote last week in my data explainer article, wastewater surveillance is quite complicated — and these three national dashboards often report different trends due to differences in geography, testing protocols, timing, and more. For example, Biobot also reports the highest coronavirus levels in the Northeast, while the CDC reports the highest levels in the South, suggesting where these dashboards may represent more sites. We’ll have to see how the trends shift with future weeks’ data.
The CDC also reports that hospitalizations are continuing to decline slowly from their peak in early January: about 3,000 people were hospitalized with Covid-19 each day in the week ending February 3, compared to 5,000 per day in the week ending January 6. Similarly, the agency reports a slow decline in test positivity from the labs in its network; note that last week’s positivity value of 6% has been revised up to 10%. The agency is also monitoring a new variant, called BA.2.87.1 and recently detected in South Africa, that has a number of mutations.
Flu indicators similarly show a plateau or potential new increase in the spread of the flu and other respiratory viruses. Southeast and Midwest states continue to report the highest levels of flu-like illness, with the greatest concentrations in Texas, New Mexico, Wyoming, Arkansas, South Carolina, and New York City. Other harmful pathogens are going around too, including norovirus (the stomach bug) and measles, the latter spreading in unvaccinated communities.
While it’s a positive sign that healthcare system metrics continue to report decreases and much lower levels than last winter’s Covid-19 surge, it’s always important to remember that our system fails to track Long Covid — now the most common adverse outcome of a SARS-CoV-2 infection. As Miles points out in his story today, many infections are now reinfections, which can be incredibly damaging. Yet our healthcare leaders barely recognize them, making data collection difficult.
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