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People at a COVID-19 vaccine clinic in Los Angeles on Aug. 5, 2022. (Xinhua via Getty Images)
Dr. Bob Wachter was an expert who diligently practiced what he preached. For three years, the prominent University of California at San Francisco physician advocated masking and vaccination for those who, like him, wanted to avoid the coronavirus, as well as the mysterious, long-lasting symptoms known as long COVID.
When Wachters wife contracted the coronavirus last year when they were on a trip to Palm Springs, Calif., together, he still managed not to get sick even after they sat next to each other in the car on the nine-hour trip back home.
But Wachters luck ran out earlier this month, when he finally contracted the coronavirus. To make matters worse, he fell in the bathroom while battling flulike symptoms and was hospitalized for stitches.
Wachter wrote on Twitter that he wanted his experience to serve as a teachable moment, a reminder that Covids still around [and] it can still be pretty nasty.
Not only is the coronavirus still around, but it appears to be returning in parts of the United States.
Read more from Yahoo News: Is the COVID pandemic really over?
Washington was not especially rattled by the infections, but the cases are a reminder that the virus lingers. Students competing in the Solar Car Challenge in Orange County, Calif., for instance, saw the race disrupted this month after about two dozen competitors tested positive for COVID-19.
When the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, visited the White House earlier this month, several members of his delegation tested positive for COVID-19. In North Carolina, Gov. Roy Cooper also caught the coronavirus this month. These do not appear to be isolated incidents.
Wastewater analysis in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Wachter lives, shows increasing levels of the coronavirus. Los Angeles is seeing a similar trend.
"There's no doubt compared to our nadirs, or the stability that we've enjoyed, that there's a slight increase in test positivity, California's health secretary, Dr. Mark Ghaly, told the Los Angeles Times this week.
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While most people arent locking down or sending kids home from summer camp, the virus appears to be causing a vibe shift. The U.S. has experienced increases in COVID-19 during the past three summers, so its not surprising to see an uptick, CDC spokeswoman Kathleen Conley told Yahoo News.
In previous coronavirus waves, colder weather drove people indoors and allowed the pathogen to spread. Extremely hot weather could have the same effect. We are in a very warm year, and people are spending a lot of time indoors, infectious disease expert Dr. Luis Ostrosky told the Wall Street Journal. People are congregating in air-conditioned settings, and that is providing an opportunity for transmission.
Most institutions that had reported coronavirus cases with online trackers are no longer producing daily updates, making both local and national trends difficult to spot. For its part, the CDC drastically scaled back its own tracking in May.
Read more from Yahoo News: COVID-19 emergency isnt over, and the most painless way to prevent it is being ignored, doctors warn
According to the Centers for Disease Control, COVID-19 hospitalizations rose by 10% in the week of July 15, as compared to the previous week, from 6,444 hospitalizations to 7,109.
Risk of getting infected is still fairly low, but clearly rising now, Dr. Tatiana Prowell, a Johns Hopkins oncologist, wrote on Twitter. Be aware.
Masking continues to be an easy means of protection, especially when traveling or gathering in crowded settings like concert venues or sports arenas. And many people have neglected to update their vaccines, meaning that they lack some protection from the ever-evolving disease. The latest spike could be driven, in part, by an Omicron subvariant known as Arcturus.
According to the CDC, only 17% of the American population has received the bivalent booster introduced last fall.
At this time, CDC's genomic surveillance indicates that the increase in infections is caused by strains closely related to the Omicron strains that have been circulating since early 2022, CDCs Conley told Yahoo News.
Those are the very strains the bivalent booster was created to target. The Food and Drug Administration is also preparing an updated booster shot that should be available in September.
Read more from Yahoo News: There will be a new COVID vaccine this fall, but will people get it?
During the Delta spike in the summer of 2021, nationwide hospitalizations for COVID-19 topped 100,000. A year later, the Omicron wave hospitalized 16,000 people across the country.
Todays figures are much smaller by comparison. And as of the week of July 22, there had been 166 deaths from COVID-19 across the United States a far cry from the 26,000 weekly deaths recorded in the U.S. in the first week of 2021.
Those at high risk for severe outcomes should make sure they're up to date on boosters and know where to access treatment if they contract the virus, Dr. Leana Wen, a professor at George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health, told Yahoo News.
Between vaccination and multiple infections, the overwhelming majority of Americans have some immunity. Many have thus simply accepted the coronavirus as a part of life.
"The pandemic, for all intents and purposes, now is gone, Donald Yealy, chief medical officer of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, told the Washington Post several weeks ago.
But, he cautioned, the virus isnt gone yet.
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Hospitalizations for COVID-19 are ticking up. But even if illnesses keep rising, it appears unlikely that they will hit previous summer peaks. EMS-Forster-Productions/Getty Images hide caption
Hospitalizations for COVID-19 are ticking up. But even if illnesses keep rising, it appears unlikely that they will hit previous summer peaks.
Yet another summer COVID-19 wave may have started in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"After roughly six, seven months of steady declines, things are starting to tick back up again," Dr. Brendan Jackson, the CDC's COVID-19 incident manager, tells NPR.
The amount of coronavirus being detected in wastewater, the percentage of people testing positive for the virus and the number of people seeking care for COVID-19 at emergency rooms all started increasing in early July, Jackson says.
"We've seen the early indicators go up for the past several weeks, and just this week for the first time in a long time we've seen hospitalizations tick up as well," Jackson says. "This could be the start of a late summer wave."
Hospitalizations jumped 10% to 7,109 for the week ending July 15, from 6,444 the previous week, according to the latest CDC data.
The increases vary around the country, with the virus appearing to be spreading the most in the southeast and the least in the Midwest, Jackson says.
But overall, the numbers remain very low far lower than in the last three summers.
"If you sort of imagine the decline in cases looking like a ski slope going down, down, down for the last six months we're just starting to see a little bit of an almost like a little ski jump at the bottom," Jackson says.
Most of the hospitalizations are among older people. And deaths from COVID-19 are still falling in fact, deaths have fallen to the lowest they've been since the CDC started tracking them, Jackson says. That could change in the coming weeks if hospitalizations keep increasing, but that's not an inevitability, Jackson says.
So the CDC has no plans to change recommendations for what most people should do, like encourage widescale masking again.
"For most people, these early signs don't need to mean much," he says.
Others agree.
"It's like when meteorologists are watching a storm forming offshore and they're not sure if it will pick up steam yet or if it will even turn towards the mainland, but they see the conditions are there and are watching closely," says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Even if infections, emergency room visits and hospitalizations continue to rise to produce another wave, most experts don't expect a surge that would be anywhere as severe as those in previous summers, largely because of the immunity people have from previous infections and vaccinations.
"We're in pretty good shape in terms of immunity. The general population seems to be in a pretty good place," says Dr. Cline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at New York University and an editor at large for public health at KFF Health News.
Some are skeptical the country will see a summer wave of any significance.
"Right now I don't see anything in the United States that supports that we're going to see a big surge of cases over the summer," says Michael Osterholm, who runs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Right now the CDC says people should continue to make individual decisions about whether to mask up while doing things like traveling or going to crowded places.
People at high risk for COVID-19 complications, such as older people and those with certain health problems, should keep protecting themselves. That means making sure they're up to date on their vaccines, testing if they think they are sick and getting treated fast if they become infected, doctors say.
"It's always a changing situation. People are becoming newly susceptible every day. People are aging into riskier age brackets. New people are being born," says Jennifer Nuzzo, who runs the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. "The work of protecting people from this virus will continue for as long as this virus continues to circulate on this planet, and I don't foresee it going away for the foreseeable future."
Scientists and doctors think there will be another COVID-19 wave this fall and winter that could be significant. As a result, the Food and Drug Administration is expected to approve a new vaccine in September to bolster waning immunity and to try to blunt whatever happens this winter.
Some projections suggest COVID-19 could be worse than a really bad flu season this year and next, which would mean tens of thousands of people would die from COVID-19 annually.
"It will still be in the top 10 causes of death, and I suspect that COVID will remain in the top 10 or 15 causes of death in the United States," says Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who helps run the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub.
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