National Covid-19 trends, February 20

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February 20, 2024

This map, from the CDC’s weekly flu surveillance report for February 16, shows that many states in the South and Midwest are currently reporting a lot of respiratory illness.

Here are the latest national Covid-19 trends, according to the CDC and major wastewater surveillance providers:

New hospital admissions with Covid-19 have increased 1%, from 3,030 admissions per day during the week ending February 3 to 3,050 admissions per day during the week ending February 10.
Test positivity has decreased 6%, from 9.9% of Covid-19 tests returning positive results during the week ending February 3 to 9.3% of tests during the week ending February 10.
Healthcare visits for influenza-like illness have increased 0.5% between the week ending February 3 and the week ending February 10.
SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has increased 3% between February 10 and February 17, per Biobot Analytics.
SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has decreased 8% between February 5 and February 12, per WastewaterSCAN.

Four months into the winter disease season, there’s still a lot of SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses going around. Wastewater and other indicators show that Covid-19 levels are still high across the country, not sharply declining as we usually expect for this time of year. Disease levels are particularly high in the South and Midwest.

Wastewater surveillance data from Biobot Analytics and WastewaterSCAN show that SARS-CoV-2 levels in our sewage are at a high plateau nationally. Biobot’s data show a very slight increase over the last month, while WWSCAN’s show a slight decrease. Both data providers report increasing viral levels in the South and Midwest, while the Northeast and West Coast report declines.

The CDC hasn’t updated its wastewater surveillance dashboard for this week yet, meaning the agency is still reporting data as of February 9. This seems to fit a pattern I’ve previously observed at the Covid-19 Data Dispatch, in which the agency often fails to update its Covid-19 data on the Friday before a long weekend even though the actual holiday takes place on a Monday. But it’s still disappointing to see this lack of transparency from the agency — particularly, as the People’s CDC pointed out in its Weather Report, the same week that journalists broke the news about a potential end to Covid-19 isolation guidance.

Hospitalization data, which the CDC did manage to update on Friday, show that Covid-19 hospitalizations have leveled off in early February after declining throughout January. With this metric now following the same trend as available wastewater data, it seems that we are indeed in for a few more weeks of high Covid-19 spread. Hospitalizations and test positivity are also higher in the South and Midwest.

Influenza-like illness, the CDC’s metric for tracking flu and similar respiratory viruses, also shows a slight increase in disease over the last couple of weeks. Similar states report both very high influenza-like illness levels and high levels of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater, per the CDC: these include Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, and others in these regions.

The Omicron variant JN.1 is causing almost all coronavirus infections in the U.S. at the moment, according to the CDC’s estimates, and new variants like BA.2.87 are on the horizon. But variants aren’t the only culprit for this winter’s surge: human behavior, particularly the lack of Covid-19 precautions in almost all public spaces, play a key role.