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 0.7 in every 100,000 people were hospitalized for COVID-19 during the week ending June 14.
- COVID-19 test positivity increased slightly, from 2.9% of COVID-19 tests returning positive results during the week ending June 14 to 3% during the week ending June 21.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater has decreased 8% between the week ending June 14 and the week ending June 21, and the national wastewater viral activity level is “very low,” per the CDC.
- SARS-CoV-2 concentration in wastewater decreased 3% between June 11 and June 18, and the national wastewater trend is “high,” per WastewaterSCAN.
This summer’s COVID-19 surge is still getting off to a rather slow start. While cases are clearly going up in parts of the West Coast and South, national averages mostly remain at moderate levels. It is possible that the new variant NB.1.8.1 has not actually arrived in significant numbers yet, though variant patterns are incredibly hard to follow as sequencing data are very limited in 2025 compared to earlier in the pandemic.
Wastewater data from the CDC, WastewaterSCAN, and Biobot Analytics all indicate that, at the national level, SARS-CoV-2 is still close to its between-surges baseline (or, as low as likely is possible without widespread public health measures). The CDC’s aggregated national average is the lowest it’s been since June 2023.
Regional data, however, show increasing disease spread in parts of the West Coast and South, continued from last week. WWSCAN reports more intense increases in the South as of mid-June, at testing sites in Florida, Georgia, Texas, Tennessee, Maryland, and other nearby states. The trend in California seems to have leveled off for now, but I’ll keep watching this state closely.
The CDC’s infectious disease forecasting center similarly reports that COVID-19 cases are “growing or likely growing” in eight states across the South and West, as of June 24: Maryland, Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Washington. Test positivity data from the CDC indicate growing cases in these states, too.
Why haven’t we seen a more pronounced surge yet? One reason may be that the variant NB.1.8.1, nicknamed “Nimbus” and spreading widely on a global scale, has not actually reached the U.S. in significant numbers yet. While the CDC’s most recent variant estimates (from mid-June) indicated NB.1.8.1 was causing about one-third of recent U.S. cases, outside modelers such as J.P. Weiland and Mike Honey have suggested that the agency may have overestimated, and, in fact, another variant, called XFG, is more prevalent right now.
If those modelers are right, we could be seeing a slower increase in cases as neither newer variant has really taken off yet — or perhaps we’re even in for less transmission this summer than in 2023 or 2024. But I write this analysis with a great deal of uncertainty, as variant surveillance is quite limited in the U.S. these days. In earlier years of the pandemic, the CDC logged tens of thousands of sequenced SARS-CoV-2 samples each week, peaking at almost 100,000 during the first Omicron surge. Now, the agency counts just hundreds of sequences each week.
Also limited: any COVID-19 testing, period. According to recent survey results, reported in JAMA Network Open, about 30% of respondents (from about 2,000 U.S. adults) would not test themselves for COVID-19 if they suspected they had the disease. Half of those said they didn’t see a reason to test. The paper shows how much our so-called public health system has failed in educating people about basic safety tools.
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[…] news outlets have started to spread the word about this summer’s wave (weeks later than us at The Sick Times). “COVID-19 levels in Bay Area wastewater have now exceeded the winter peak” in WWSCAN’s […]
[…] As I noted last week, some epidemiologists and virologists have suggested that COVID-19 increases have been slow here because the U.S. is not yet seeing concerning new variants (NB.1.8.1, XFG) in big numbers, or perhaps because this season’s concerning variants may be less successful here in reinfecting people than in other countries. This is tough to follow as we have very limited data: the CDC has not updated its variant estimates since mid-June because testing labs aren’t getting enough SARS-CoV-2 samples to sequence. […]