The United States is in the middle of a wintertime COVID wave, driven by holiday gatherings, people spending more time inside, waning immunity from low uptake of the new COVID vaccine and a new highly infectious COVID variant, JN.1.
A viral social media post based on data from the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention is calling this surge the second-biggest COVID wave in the history of the U.S. — after the omicron surge from late 2021 to early 2022, which infected more people than even the early days of the pandemic.
Lucky Tran, Ph.D., science communicator at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, compiled the CDC data into a graph, which has been shared widely on Instagram and X, formerly known as Twitter.
Tran also said in his post that projections show as many as 1 in 3 people in the U.S. could be infected with COVID during the peak months of the current wave and up to 2 million people could be infected in a single day — data he attributed in an email to TODAY.com to Michael Hoerger, Ph.D., assistant professor at Tulane University School of Medicine who leads the Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative’s data tracker.
Is the U.S. in a COVID wave?
Yes, the U.S. is in the middle of a COVID wave, multiple experts tell TODAY.com.
The CDC no longer tracks positive COVID tests and instead relies on presence of the virus wastewater to determine how widespread it is.
Indeed, a CDC chart of national and regional COVID trends in wastewater shows the national viral activity rate of 11.23 from the week ending Dec. 23, 2023 (the most recent data available) is higher than anything seen since January 2022, as far back as the publicly available CDC data goes. The national rate for the week ending Jan. 15, 2022, was 22.78. What’s more, the next round of CDC wastewater data may show a further rise in viral activity after accounting for infections from Christmas gatherings, experts say.
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