NBC News Covid hospitalizations, deaths and wastewater data — among other indicators — are all increasing as the U.S. heads into fall.
Signs in the U.S. continue to point to a rise in Covid activity as fall approaches.
Hospitalizations are rising. Deaths have ticked up. Wastewater samples are picking up the virus, as are labs across the country.
“Every single one of those things is showing us that we have increased rates of Covid transmission in our communities,” said Jodie Guest, a professor of epidemiology at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta.
While individual cases have become more difficult to track as states are no longer required to report numbers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and at-home test use has increased, experts have turned to other tools to track the virus.
Hospitalizations, for example, are “a very good indicator of severity of Covid disease,” Guest said.
The number of hospitalized Covid patients has continued to rise after hitting an all-time low in late June. The week ending Aug. 19, the most recent date for which data is available, there were just over 15,000 people hospitalized with Covid, up 19% from the previous week, according to the CDC.
The increase comes even as hospital testing protocols have changed. At the height of the pandemic, every patient admitted to the hospital was tested for Covid, whether they had symptoms or not.
“We’re now only testing people who are symptomatic,” said Guest, who added that this makes it difficult to directly compare hospitalization numbers to what was seen previously in the pandemic. Current numbers may be missing asymptomatic cases and therefore be lower than earlier ones.
Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said that at his hospital system, 21 patients are hospitalized with Covid. Earlier in the summer, it ranged from 10 to 15 patients, he said, so while the numbers have gone up, it’s nothing like what the hospital saw last winter, when more than 100 patients were hospitalized with Covid.
Emergency room visits with a Covid diagnosis in the U.S. have been on the rise since early July. The week ending Aug. 19 saw 2.3% of ER visits with a Covid diagnosis, up from 0.5% the week ending July 1, according to the CDC.