Why Covid Is Spreading Again This Summer
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's forecasting model estimates that infections are growing, or likely growing, in most states.
While the agency is reporting low levels of the virus in wastewater nationally, some states, including Texas, Utah and Nevada, are showing very high concentrations of Covid in their wastewater. Emergency department visits linked to Covid are rising, too.
Researchers have braced for an uptick. Though the virus is largely unpredictable — variants shape-shift and symptoms can change from one infection to the next — Covid cases have gone up every summer since the pandemic began.
Around this time last year, there were higher levels of Covid in wastewater than there are currently; this appears to be, so far, a milder wave.
As of June, when the C.D.C. last updated its variant tracker, the Covid variant NB.1.8.1. — nicknamed 'Nimbus' — accounted for the most cases in the United States, around 43 percent.
The variant does not appear to make people sicker than other recent strains of the virus, but it does have a few additional mutations that might make it more transmissible and better at evading the immune system's defenses, said Dr. Aubree Gordon, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan.
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