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 3 in every 100,000 people were hospitalized for Covid-19 during the week ending July 20. (Note that these are provisional data.)
- Covid-19 test positivity has increased 14%, from 14.3% of Covid-19 tests returning positive results during the week ending July 20 to 16.3% of tests during the week ending July 27.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has increased 12% between the week ending July 20 and the week ending July 27, and the national wastewater viral activity level is “high,” per the CDC.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has increased 1% between the week of July 22 and the week of July 29, per Biobot Analytics.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has decreased 10% between July 20 and July 27, per WastewaterSCAN.
Covid-19 continues spreading wildly across the U.S., as our summer surge shows few signs of slowing. For some parts of the country, SARS-CoV-2 levels have far surpassed last summer and are even at or above last winter, as variants combined with our collective lack of mitigation measures drive ongoing spread. Banning important public health tools like masks, as local politicians in Nassau County, New York did yesterday, will only make things worse.
Wastewater data from the CDC, Biobot Analytics, and WastewaterSCAN show that national SARS-CoV-2 levels have continued rising in recent weeks. Levels are especially high on the West Coast and in the South; for these two regions, virus spread is approaching the peaks reported during last winter’s surge, according to the CDC and WWSCAN.
Biobot and WWSCAN’s data suggest that the summer surge might have reached its peak, with Biobot reporting a very slight increase in national SARS-CoV-2 levels during the week of July 29 and WWSCAN reporting a decrease between July 20 and 27. However, I’m skeptical about assigning a trend to just one week of data; the West Coast in particular has remained at stubbornly high levels (despite reports of potential plateaus) for a month now.
The South may soon overtake the West as the region with the most Covid-19 spread. CDC wastewater data, along with the agency’s estimates of infection trends, indicate that the disease is spreading at very high levels across Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, the Carolinas, and other adjacent states. Extreme weather also hitting this region — like Tropical Storm Debby, which hit Florida yesterday with “catastrophic flooding,” per the Associated Press — may exacerbate Covid-19 outbreaks.
Our limited healthcare system data show that this Covid-19 surge is also hitting hospitals and doctors’ offices. Test positivity has continued to go sharply up, according to the network of labs reporting to the CDC, as have emergency department visits for Covid-19 and Covid-associated hospitalizations. While hospitalization rates are still lower than the winter, it’s important to remember that these data are much less comprehensive than earlier in the pandemic; the data will improve a bit starting in November, thanks to recently-updated requirements for hospitals.
Newer coronavirus variants KP.2, KP.3, and relatives have driven this surge, with our collective lack of safety measures making it easy for them to spread. Dr. Eric Topol explains why these variants are so competitive in a recent issue of his newsletter, Ground Truths. This fall’s vaccines should work well against the latest variants, but the shots won’t be available until September — a failure of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Topol argues. “For convenience, and opposed to all the data, the FDA has tried to force fit Covid to be like Flu and that’s wrong,” he writes.
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