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 4 in every 100,000 people were hospitalized for Covid-19 during the week ending July 27. (Note that these are provisional data.)
- Covid-19 test positivity has increased 7%, from 16.4% of Covid-19 tests returning positive results during the week ending July 27 to 17.6% of tests during the week ending August 3.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has increased 25% between the week ending July 27 and the week ending August 3, and the national wastewater viral activity level is “very high,” per the CDC.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has increased 8% between the week of July 29 and the week of August 5, per Biobot Analytics.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has decreased 10% between July 27 and August 3, per WastewaterSCAN.
Covid-19 continues to spread at stubbornly high levels across the U.S., as the summer surge shows few signs of slowing. Some epidemiologists and public health experts have expressed surprise at the height and length of this summer’s wave; of course, to anyone still taking precautions, it’s not shocking that the disease would spread unabated without widespread masking, testing, or other measures.
Wastewater data from the CDC, Biobot Analytics, and WastewaterSCAN all report high SARS-CoV-2 levels and increases or plateaus across regions, though the West Coast and South continue to report the highest levels. The CDC even marks national wastewater viral activity levels as “very high”. If you’ve read my recent wastewater data explainer, you know that when the CDC says levels are “very high,” they are, in fact, very, very, very high.
While current wastewater data can certainly tell us that the country is in a significant summer surge — higher than last summer’s in many places — remember that these data aren’t standardized or well-understood enough for us to say exactly how many people are sick with Covid-19. Epidemiologist Abby Cartus recently posted a two-part deep-dive into the Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative’s models, one popular source for such wastewater-to-case estimates; I recommend it for readers interested in the details here.
Along with wastewater data, hospitalizations and test positivity similarly show high and increasing Covid-19 levels across the U.S. In California, for example, there were nearly eight Covid-19 hospitalizations for every 100,000 residents in early July — double the hospitalization rate at this time in 2023 and close to the peak of this past winter’s surge, according to the CDC’s COVID-NET network. Test positivity for the country, per the network of PCR labs still reporting to the CDC, has passed last winter’s peak.
Contradicting the hopeful statements of many health leaders, Covid-19 has resolutely failed to become a seasonal pathogen, or only spread widely in winter. These statements failed to account for SARS-CoV-2’s continued evolution, which has been much faster and more pronounced than other viruses, pointed out evolutionary biologist T. Ryan Gregory in a post on Twitter/X.
Covid-19 also continues to cause severe disease, death, and disability — but our systems to track these outcomes have been dismantled over the last couple of years, leaving us with less reliable data. For instance, recent CDC data suggest that Covid-19 dropped from the fourth-leading cause of death in 2022 to the tenth-leading cause in 2023; but the 2023 data likely missed many Covid-19 deaths, and they certainly don’t include all deaths from Long Covid.
Leave a Reply