Why does it feel like everyone is getting Covid?

Aug 15, 2024, 6:00 AM CDT

We’re presently in what appears to be the worst Covid-19 summer surge in several years, especially in the southern US. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), all of the metrics related to Covid-19 that we should be worried about are going up — not just cases, but hospitalizations and deaths, too.

Even if we’re no longer in the depths of the pandemic, and we have treatments to lessen its severity and vaccines for protection, contracting Covid-19 carries risks. That’s particularly true for people over 65, people with comorbidities like heart or lung disease, or those who are immunocompromised. And the lingering health challenges of long Covid remain a risk.

The good news is that on the whole, Americans are much better protected than we once were against serious illness, because most people have been infected, vaccinated, or both. However, it’s still important to take precautions as Covid-19 cases increase in most states across the US.

Here’s what we know so far about the surge this year, and what you can do to keep yourself and your community healthy.

How do we know we’re in a summer surge?

The Centers for Disease Control has found that cases are increasing or likely increasing in 32 states. This follows a seasonal pattern that’s begun to emerge with Covid. We saw a similar surge last summer, though according to CDC data, cases are exceeding levels from around this time last year.

“It’s not just last summer — even when we were having the pandemic, if you look at the graphs, infection was always very high during the summer and also during the winter,” said Kizzmekia Corbett-Helaire, assistant professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard’s School of Public Health.

We don’t know exactly why the summer surge happens, Corbett-Helaire said. Some of it could be due to the underlying characteristics of the virus, and some due to human behavior, like increased travel.

At the moment, Covid hospitalizations and deaths are rising but still relatively low — the latest data shows that 1.5 percent of deaths in the US are the result of Covid, and 2.3 percent of emergency room visits during the week ending August 3 were diagnosed as Covid-19.

CDC data comes from a variety of sources. But one important source for tracking transmission rates is wastewater testing, which involves tracking the amount of virus in local sewage. Early in the pandemic, before at-home testing was accessible, data from clinical testing was used to track infection rates. Now, however, fewer Americans are testing and reporting their status, making test-based tracking unreliable.

That makes wastewater testing the best available metric for getting a timely picture of the presence of illness in a community, according to Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

“It’s kind of becoming the way of the future” and is being used to test for the presence of other illnesses, including mpox, he told Vox.

And the wastewater says the US is in the midst of a surge approaching infection levels not seen since last winter, which was the worst increase since 2022.