The 11th wave is still rising.
🔥23 states/territories High/Very High
🔥Very High: Alabama, DC, Guam, Hawai'i, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, South Carolina, Texas, Utah
🔥1 in 56 estimated actively infectious
🔥876,000 new daily infections
PMC Dashboard Update (U.S.) 🧵2 of 8
Note that the CDC has modified 📉 how transmission levels correspond to the categorical bins.
Take California. We estimate 1 in 30 actively infectious statewide. This would have previously been "Very High," now just "High."
#NewNormal
PMC Dashboard Update (U.S.) 🧵3 of 8
Here are the prevalence estimates for the first half of states/territories.
Notice how high the levels are in some of the "Moderate" states.
PMC Dashboard Update (U.S.) 🧵4 of 8
Here are the prevalence estimates for the second half of states/territories.
What's striking here is that you see some of the "Very Low" states like NY and NM are at nearly 1% actively infectious.
PMC Dashboard Update (U.S.) 🧵5 of 8
We're in an 11th COVlD wave.
Many are getting infected while waiting on delayed vaccine approvals. Millions more are being denied vaccine access entirely.
Few public health groups mention the importance of N95 masks and air purifiers.
PMC Dashboard Update (U.S.) 🧵6 of 8
Based on Swiss Re actuarial data, we partition excess deaths according to wastewater levels & estimate up to 2,900 Americans will die from this week's infections.
They will be cardiovascular, cancer, & misc deaths. Rarely counted as C19.
PMC Dashboard Update (U.S.) 🧵7 of 8
We just had the largest relative increase in summer transmission in 4 years.
But transmission has leveled off (red line). This is atypical based on the most similar prior waves (blue, yellow).
We may so a retroactive correction upward.
PMC Dashboard Update (U.S.) 🧵8 of 8
We have improved the forecasting model, especially for summer waves, but have increased the expected level of error in real-time reporting (CDC corrections, Biobot lags), which yields broader confidence intervals.
If the CDC retroactively corrects the most recent real-time data upward, which is plausible, we could head toward 1.2-1.5 million new daily infections. If the numbers hold, the peak will be closer to 0.9 to 1.0 million new daily infections and occur around Sept 6. Significant transmission occurs on the back end of waves. Most people won't even realize we're in a wave until mid to late September.
I don't envision a more optimistic scenario but hope for it.
Find the full report at
I'll post plenty of explainer posts over the next 2 weeks. Please also use, improve, and share widely. I'm mostly here and on IG these days.pmc19.com/data
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Second, a lot of people can sustain a strong denial of reality about the ongoing pandemic during lulls. They suppress the existence of COVlD waves and excess deaths, disability, and retirements.
During waves, those defenses burst. Loss of control = anger...
Third, a lot of people (many reading this) understand COVlD correctly & experience righteous indignation during COVlD waves. We quite reasonably do not like all of the unjust and gratuitous suffering.
I find it helpful to channel that intensity into helping other people....
🚩🚩🚩
As a vigorous defender of #CDC data, their switch from using normalized to non-normalized COVlD wastewater surveillance data today harms data quality.
"Normalizing" means accounting for basic confounders like rain levels. It is a choice to use worse data.
1/5🧵
Historically, the CDC data have correlated near-perfectly with similar metrics, such as Biobot's wastewater estimates (still active) or the IHME true case estimates (through mid-2023).
The changes reduce those correlations. It's like going from an A+ to a B.
2/5🧵
You can readily see the loss of data quality in the PMC "whole pandemic" graph (preview shown, subject to change) with choppier waves, caused by the CDC adding extra noise to the data and applying retroactively from BA.1 Omicron to present.
U.S. CDC numbers just released. Good news (for those not in Louisiana). "Only" a 5% national increase.
2025 has closely tracked with summer 2023 transmission. A 12-13% increase would have been expected based on those numbers. That said...
real-time data have been prone to retroactive corrections. This is frustrating, of course, because it leaves people making decisions based on data that are only of good quality when 2 weeks old.
If we saw a 12% increase this week, I'd say look at 2023 for a glimpse...
at the future. Instead, I would consider these plausible scenarios:
🔹Wave still similar to 2023
🔹Later wave with schools more implicated
🔹Something temporarily much better