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:
- About 2 in every 100,000 people were hospitalized for Covid-19 during the week ending July 6. (Note that these are provisional data.)
- Covid-19 test positivity has increased 21%, from 9.1% of Covid-19 tests returning positive results during the week ending June 29 to 11% of tests during the week ending July 6.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has increased 39% between the week ending June 29 and the week ending July 6, and the national wastewater viral activity level is “high,” per the CDC.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has increased 5% between the week of July 1 and the week of July 8, per Biobot Analytics.
The U.S. is well into our summer Covid-19 surge: even the CDC’s wastewater dashboard now acknowledges that the country is facing high coronavirus activity. Yet most travel and gatherings continue without any precautions, making it easier for the latest variants to spread.
Wastewater data from the CDC, Biobot Analytics, and WastewaterSCAN all show that Covid-19 spread has accelerated in the U.S. since my last update. The CDC’s dashboard, which (as I’ve noted before) has a higher baseline than other data sources, is now calling national coronavirus levels “high.” Current levels are close to the peaks reported last summer by all three dashboards, but recent trends suggest that disease spread may continue to increase from here.
The West Coast remains a regional hotspot, as it’s been for the last two months. Coronavirus levels may have plateaued in this region, according to the CDC, but show no sign of decreasing; meanwhile, other regions continue to catch up. States with “very high” SARS-CoV-2 levels in their wastewater include California, Oregon, Nevada, Texas, Arkansas, Florida, and Maryland, with many others reporting “high” levels.
You may notice that WastewaterSCAN is missing from the data points at the top of today’s update. This is because the organization recently stopped testing at many of its sites, leaving its trendlines difficult to interpret. I’m working on a story about this recent change and the current state of Covid-19 wastewater data in the U.S. more broadly; email me with any questions you’d like me to address in that piece.
PCR testing and hospitalization data also indicate that we’re well into the summer surge. Test positivity from the CDC’s network is now over 10%, which I consider a threshold for high disease spread. The Walgreens Covid-19 dashboard shows a similar major increase in positive tests done by this pharmacy chain in recent weeks. While hospitalizations are still relatively low (at about two people currently hospitalized for every 100,000 Americans, per the CDC), these data are much less complete than the hospitalization numbers we had earlier in the pandemic.
Recent variants KP.2, KP.3, and related lineages are dominating this summer’s surge, reinfecting people and amplifying the effects of summer travel and holiday events. In response to similarly high case numbers in Europe and illness among athletes, the Tour de France recently required masks for race officials and spectators; as science communicator Lucky Tran observed on Twitter/X, it’s shameful that this organization reinstated a mask mandate before many healthcare facilities.
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