This week’s hospital admission rate follows last week’s rise of more than 10 percent. While this data suggests more infections, a metric the CDC does not track anymore, it remains unclear how concerned people should be.
Wow if only there was some sort of institution that should help us understand how concerned we should be.
XBB, EG.5 (descendant of XBB.1.9.2 that has an extra spike mutation), XBB.1.9.2, XBB.1.9.1, and XBB.1.16 levels are all growing right now while XBB.1.5 levels are shrinking, according to to the wastewater variant graph.
Maybe it'll do the Simpsons thing and not spike as hard because there's so many of them this time?
So far, lower spikes tend to just mean longer waves with a higher floor. If you look at the wastewater for county levels you can see the higher floor at the nationwide regional level is made from "random" (ie, we're not tracking anything) smaller spikes hitting the counties throughout the rest of the year. This is because people's short term immunity is going out of sync and it's slowing down the velocity of infections, whether that's due to the number of variants or the vaccines, idk. But, you can also the floor rising on the county level. Our best case scenario (which is still going to be horrible) seems to be if we just end up in an endless wave that's about half of what we spiked to during Delta... Worst case scenario is the variants mutate enough that they no longer offer immunity to each other and our endless wave comes with bonus spikes.
For some real
keep an eye on the year over year in the coming months.
Good news, everyone! XBB 1.5 boosters are due out this fall. And just in time, too!