(Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images) Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune/TNS/Getty ImagesĮarly testing suggests variant BA.2.86 has been detected in US wastewater, CDC report says There were about 15,000 new hospital admissions for Covid-19 in the week ending August 19, according to CDC data - less than half of what the numbers were at this time last year and lower than they were for about 80% of the pandemic.īinaxNOW COVID-19 test kits were made available to students at Whitney Young High School, Feb. The idea was that case rates in a hospital could serve as a proxy for case rates in the broader community. Hospitals were regularly testing all patients, whether they were coming in for Covid-related symptoms or for something else entirely, and they are required to report positive cases. The CDC officially stopped reporting aggregate Covid-19 case counts months ago, noting that data had become less representative of actual infections or transmission levels over time.Īs case counts started to become less reliable, some experts first pointed to hospitalization metrics as a reasonable substitute to gauge transmission. But the rise of rapid home tests - and general waning of public interest in testing at all - has all but erased the ability to grasp current case counts nationwide. Tracking Covid-19 trends has always had its challenges. And IHME estimates from that time suggest that the US was in one of the worst waves of the pandemic, second only to the Omicron surge. In mid-December, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was reporting about 500,000 cases a week. Mokdad declined to quantify an estimate for current case counts, but he said he’s been getting lots of calls and questions about Covid-19 recently - similar to what he experienced around the end of last year. “We felt that the margin of error became really too big for us to make a prediction that we could stand by and defend.” “The surveillance system was not adequate anymore to capture changes in Covid-19,” he said. It may be time to break out the masks against Covid, some experts sayĪll of the measures that factored into the model had stopped being reported or had changed in some way, said Ali Mokdad, professor of health metrics sciences and chief strategy officer of population health at the University of Washington. But the research institute paused that modeling in December.Ī mid adult female, standing outside places an N95 mask on her face for protection during the pandemic. “And we should be paying attention to it, because we are starting to see an increase.”įrom 2020 to 2022, the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation produced regular estimates of Covid-19 case rates and projections for trends. “There is more transmission out there than what the surveillance data indicates,” said Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists. Rates of severe disease may be staying at relatively low levels, but experts agree that there are probably more infections than the current surveillance systems can capture. “We have several folks down with Covid, unfortunately,” one health-focused nonprofit told CNN when seeking comment for this story. Here’s how to think about risk from the virus now Crowd of people huddled together, overhead view - stock photo Daly and Newton/The Image Bank RF/Getty ImagesĬovid-19 has changed and so has our immunity.
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