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 3.8 in every 100,000 people were hospitalized for COVID-19 during the week ending September 7. (Note that these are provisional data.)
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has decreased 7% between the week ending September 7 and the week ending September 14, and the national wastewater viral activity level is “high,” per the CDC.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has decreased 15% between September 4 and September 11, per WastewaterSCAN.
We’re still in the long, slow decline period of this summer’s COVID-19 surge. Disease spread remains high across the country as viral levels in wastewater, emergency department visits, and hospitalizations creep downward. We may get a brief lull in transmission before an inevitable winter surge, but levels are unlikely to drop far enough to really be considered low.
Wastewater data from the CDC, WastewaterSCAN, and Biobot Analytics all show declining (but still high) SARS-CoV-2 levels nationally. The CDC and WWSCAN data this week are more definitive than they were last week in showing declines across all regions. The West Coast, in particular, is trending down again after reporting a potential increase last week.
Biobot finally published a weekly report last week, their first update in about a month. While still helpful for comparison to the other wastewater data sources, the latest Biobot update doesn’t include a specific estimate of average national virus concentration — making it harder to compare recent data to prior COVID-19 waves. The report does not provide a reason for this change.
At regional levels, the CDC reports that the West Coast still has the highest COVID-19 spread while WastewaterSCAN and Biobot report higher levels in the Midwest and Northeast. As always, these discrepancies are tough to interpret; they are likely due to a combination of which sampling sites are represented on which dashboards and differences in sampling and analysis methods.
The CDC’s modeling estimates of infection trends, which are based on emergency department visits, suggest that COVID-19 levels are only “growing or likely growing” in three states: Washington, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. In all other states, levels are declining, likely declining, stable, or uncertain — suggesting that our limited healthcare system data align with the wastewater data.
As we haven’t seen a new concerning variant rise in the U.S. for a few months, some modelers are suggesting we may get a brief lull in infections before cold weather and indoor gatherings inevitably contribute to a winter surge. However, as cases decline, we are receiving more data about the cost of this summer’s wave. The CDC now reports that more than 1,000 people died of COVID-19 each week in August, and these numbers are likely a significant undercount.
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