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:
- New hospital admissions with Covid-19 have decreased 15%, from 1,400 admissions per day during the week ending March 23 to 1,100 admissions per day during the week ending March 30.
- Test positivity has decreased 15%, from 4.1% of Covid-19 tests returning positive results during the week ending March 23 to 3.5% of tests during the week ending March 30.
- Healthcare visits for influenza-like illness have decreased 4% between the week ending March 23 and the week ending March 30.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has decreased 6% between the week ending March 23 and the week ending March 30, and the national wastewater viral activity level is low, per the CDC.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has decreased 2% between March 30 and April 6 per Biobot Analytics.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has decreased 12% between March 25 and April 1, per WastewaterSCAN.
Covid-19 metrics continue to slowly trend down as the end of this past winter’s surge recedes into a lower-risk spring, with reports from wastewater suggesting that the decline in transmission is leveling off. However, these low points come with a lot more virus spread than they used to in the early years of the pandemic, due to a combination of SARS-CoV-2’s continued evolution and a lack of widespread precautions.
The three main wastewater surveillance dashboards all report slowly-declining coronavirus levels nationwide, heading into plateaus. Biobot Analytics — which provides the most recent wastewater data but reports on a less comprehensive group of testing sites than the CDC does — reports a decrease of just 2% in national SARS-CoV-2 levels between March 30 and April 6.
Biobot also continues to disagree with the other two national wastewater data providers, the CDC and WastewaterSCAN, about how current coronavirus levels compare to past years. Biobot reports that current levels are slightly above those reported in early April 2023, while the other two dashboards report that April 2024 is significantly lower than 2023. It’s tough to hypothesize why the data sources might disagree here, but worth noting that the CDC’s process for calculating national trends is relatively new and the agency is constantly updating its estimates.
Despite this disagreement about national levels, the three wastewater dashboards all agree that parts of the Northeast have reported a small uptick in SARS-CoV-2 spread over the last week or two. Last week, I wrote that this region (specifically New York and New Jersey) has a higher prevalence of JN.1.13, the latest variant of interest; the CDC only updates its variant data every two weeks these days, so we’ll need to wait until next week for new information there.
Hospitalizations for Covid-19 continue to decline, as they have since early January. Per the CDC, newly hospitalized patients for the week ending March 30 were the lowest reported since July 2023. This low point still represents a lot of severe illness, though, with more than 1,000 people dying from Covid-19 every week in February and early March (and that’s likely an undercount). We also continue to have no real-time data for Long Covid, now the most common severe outcome of a SARS-CoV-2 infection.
While the seasonal flu and other respiratory viruses continue to decline in disease spread, the CDC has asked doctors to be on the lookout for more cases of bird flu (H5N1) among farmers, following the recently-infected dairy farmer. Some flu experts have called for increased research into H5N1’s evolution as it infects different animal populations, along with more protections for the workers who may be exposed. As flu viruses spread through the air, like SARS-CoV-2, high-quality masks and respirators are good protection against both.
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