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 14%, from 2,500 admissions per day during the week ending February 24 to 2,200 admissions per day during the week ending March 2.
- Test positivity has decreased 13%, from 7.5% of Covid-19 tests returning positive results during the week ending February 24 to 6.5% of tests during the week ending March 2.
- Healthcare visits for influenza-like illness have decreased 6% between the week ending February 24 and the week ending March 2.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has decreased 24% between the week ending February 24 and the week ending March 2, and the national wastewater viral activity level is moderate, per the CDC.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has decreased 27% between February 26 and March 4, per WastewaterSCAN.
Continuing the tentatively good news from last week, all major Covid-19 metrics are trending toward declining disease spread. But there’s still a lot of this virus going around; it will be several more weeks before SARS-CoV-2 levels may actually be called low, especially in South and Midwest states that had late-winter peaks.
Wastewater surveillance data show declining, yet still moderately-high viral levels across the country. According to the CDC’s dashboard, national SARS-CoV-2 activity in wastewater is the lowest it’s been since November 2023. The CDC also changed its classification of the national viral activity level this week, from “high” to “moderate.” WastewaterSCAN similarly now classifies the national viral level as “medium,” down from “high.”
Even the Midwest and South, the two regions that had significantly increased Covid-19 spread in February, are now clearly trending down again, according to the CDC and WWSCAN’s wastewater analysis. Some of these states still report “high” or “very high” SARS-CoV-2 levels, however, as it takes time for transmission to come down from a peak. These include Tennessee, Kansas, Georgia, and Virginia. (Biobot Analytics, usually part of these updates, hasn’t updated their data for this week as of publication.)
The CDC’s hospitalization and limited testing data provide a similar picture. About 2,200 people were newly hospitalized with Covid-19 every day in the week ending March 2, less than half of the daily hospitalizations reported during this winter’s peak in early January (about 5,000 a day). Emergency department visits and test positivity are similarly going down, though more slowly than during this time in past years.
In other virus news, flu transmission is also starting to slowly go down again after plateauing for most of February, according to the CDC’s tracking of doctors visits. Other flu indicators (test positivity, hospitalizations) remain at similarly high levels. Notably, flu led to about 1,400 new hospitalizations each day in the week ending March 2, while Covid-19 led to 2,200.
A recent paper from researchers at the Cleveland Clinic Health System, published in The Lancet, adds to existing evidence showing that the fall 2023 Covid-19 vaccine worked well against the variants that spread widely this winter. However, only 23% of U.S. adults have received this year’s Covid-19 vaccine, compared to 48% who got the flu shot. And vaccinations are one of a select few precautionary messages that the U.S. government actually, actively recommends. It’s easy to see the public health failure here.
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