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“After roughly six, seven months of steady declines, things are starting to tick back up again,” said CDC’s COVID incident manager Dr. Brendan Jackson, according to a report by NPR.
COVID-hospital admissions during the week ending Saturday, July 22, increased 10.3 percent over the previous week, according to CDC data.
In addition, visits to the emergency room were up more than 17 percent and the positive test percentage went up 1.3 percent.
One of the causes of the trend could be excessive heat, which is sending people indoors into air-conditioned settings.
The US has seen increases in COVID each of the last three summers, and this year's increases in cases and hospitalizations are notably lower than the surge in the summer of 2022 fueled by the BA.5 Omicron subvariant.
Despite the new uptick, hospitalizations for COVID cases are still at a historic low since the pandemic began in March 2020, a CDC graph shows.
“Because we may start seeing seasonality patterns like we do with other respiratory diseases, I think how big this wave gets this summer will be very telling,” Katelyn Jetelina, a scientific adviser to the CDC and White House, told the Wall Street Journal.
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