By Caroline Kee
December 23, 2024
Source: TODAY
Photo / Image Source: Unsplash,
This year's winter COVID-19 wave is off to a late start, and experts expect cases to keep rising. Here's what to know.
As the holidays arrive and travel peaks, COVID-19 is on the rise again across the country. However, this year's winter COVID wave is off to a later start than usual, and some experts are warning about a potential "silent" surge in transmission over the holiday season.
They're calling it "silent" because this winter wave follows a long period of unusually low COVID activity this fall, so many people are unaware that COVID levels have risen sharply over the past two weeks, the most recent wastewater data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show.
As a result, people may not know their risk of infection is increasing and not test if they have only mild symptoms, which can cause the virus to spread at holiday gatherings, during travel and more.
As of Dec. 14, wastewater viral activity of SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes COVID-19 — is “high” or “very high” in 21 states, according to CDC data.
“There’s a good chance that a lot of people are going to get sick in the next couple of weeks and be unaware of it. Most people are not tracking CDC data, and so their only way of knowing whether we’re in a wave is if they’ve gotten sick,” Michael Hoerger, Ph.D., associate professor at Tulane University School of Medicine and public health expert on tracking COVID-19 trends, tells TODAY.com.
While the data do not yet show the U.S. is in a large COVID surge, the country is entering its 10th COVID wave since the pandemic started, Hoerger adds.
But there's a great deal of uncertainty about how bad this year's winter wave will be and how long it will last. “This is a very risky time in terms of lots of people interacting indoors, so we don’t really know how quickly transmission can pick up,” Hoerger says.
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