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 11%, from 800 admissions per day during the week ending April 20 to 700 admissions per day during the week ending April 27.
- Test positivity has decreased 3%, from 3.1% of Covid-19 tests returning positive results during the week ending April 20 to 3.0% of tests during the week ending April 27.
- Healthcare visits for influenza-like illness have decreased 2% between the week ending April 20 and the week ending April 27, and these visits are below the baseline for respiratory virus season.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has decreased 11% between the week ending April 20 and the week ending April 27, and the national wastewater viral activity level is minimal, per the CDC.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has increased 2% between April 27 and May 4, per Biobot Analytics.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has increased 1% between April 22 and April 29, per WastewaterSCAN.
Covid-19 spread in the U.S. is still at a lull, following the trend we’ve observed since mid-March. In this era of the pandemic, though, low points in transmission still mean thousands of new infections every day. And the CDC just stopped tracking Covid-19 hospitalizations, removing one of our more reliable data sources as a new variant is on the horizon.
The U.S.’s major wastewater trackers (the CDC, Biobot Analytics, and WastewaterSCAN) all continue to report moderate plateaus in coronavirus levels in the country’s sewage. WastewaterSCAN, for example, shows little change in coronavirus levels during the month of April. Current levels are slightly lower than last spring and early summer, but much higher than the true lows we experienced in 2021 and 2022, according to WWSCAN.
Hospitalizations are at a lower point: according to the CDC, new hospital admissions for Covid-19 during the week ending April 27, at about 700 new patients per day, were the lowest reported since the federal government started requiring hospitals to report their Covid-19 patient numbers in summer 2020. Unfortunately, this week is also the last that this metric will be available, as the federal government has stopped requiring hospitals to report Covid-19 data.
Notably, unlike the CDC’s poor isolation guidance, this hospitalization reporting change wasn’t a choice by the agency itself — rather, the CDC is losing a new reporting power that it gained at the beginning of the pandemic. In response, the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the CDC, has proposed a new rule that would restart some Covid-19 and flu data reporting on a longer-term basis; you can leave comments for the HHS about that proposed rule here.
Even with that proposed rule, though, data collection from all hospitals would not resume until the fall, with the CDC relying on a smaller subset of facilities in the meantime (see last week’s update). With less comprehensive hospitalization data and no case data, many people now rely on information from wastewater surveillance, but this data source can also be unreliable. For instance, New York City, which has one of the longest-running Covid-19 wastewater surveillance programs in the U.S., recently failed to publish its data for two months.
Our lack of reliable, comprehensive Covid-19 data will make it difficult to track the impacts of KP.2, a new coronavirus variant that is spreading quickly in the U.S. The variant could simply keep the country’s infection trends at their current lull or could contribute to a new surge in the coming weeks, modeler JP Weiland recently hypothesized on Twitter/X. It’s currently hard to say.
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