As families prepare to gather for the holidays, a new COVID-19 map reveals the latest infection rates across the United States.
What’s New
For the week ending December 14, 5.6 percent of tests nationwide came back positive, up from 5 percent the previous week.
Wyoming, Utah, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Colorado, as well as Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois had the highest percentage of positive tests, at 7.3 percent in the week ending December 14.
There was a 6.6 percent positivity rate across Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Louisiana and Arkansas, while Nebraska, Missouri and Kansas had a 6.3 percent positivity rate.
The Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, New York and New Jersey had a 5 percent positivity rate. In all the other states, less than 5 percent of tests came back positive.
Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, as well as Florida and Alabama had, had the lowest positivity rate, with just 2.3 percent of tests coming back positive.
CDC
Nationwide, CDC data shows that across the country, 0.7 percent of visits to the ER were associated with COVID-19 on the week ending 14 December. New Mexico had the highest percentage these, at 2 percent. Kentucky followed with 1.4 percent, while 1.3 percent of ER visits in South Dakota and Indiana were associated with COVID-19. In New Hampshire and Arizona, 1.2 percent of ER visits were associated with the virus. And 1.1 percent of ER visits were associated with COVID-19 in Wisconsin, West Virginia, Maine, Kansas, Illinois and Colorado.
In all the other states, less than 1.1 percent of ER visits were associated with COVID.
There were 254 COVID-19 deaths nationwide during the week ending December 14, down from 335 the week before but up from 179 deaths the week ending November 30.
The CDC monitors COVID-19 levels in wastewater as part of its surveillance strategy to track the spread of the virus in communities. Infected individuals shed the virus in their feces, meaning that monitoring wastewater can reveal increases in infection rates earlier than clinical testing or hospitalizations.
“The wastewater viral activity level indicates whether the amount of virus in the wastewater is minimal, low, moderate, high or very high. The wastewater viral activity levels may indicate the risk of infection in an area,” the CDC said.
Currently, only New Mexico, Kansas and New Hampshire have very high levels of SARS-CoV-2 in its wastewater. Nationwide, the levels of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater is moderate.
Why It Matters
The world was transformed by the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Business as usual ground to a halt when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, about four months after the virus was first detected in Wuhan, China.
Since the pandemic was affirmed, the WHO reports that around 777 million people have been infected by the virus worldwide. Meanwhile, the illness has an overall worldwide mortality rate of a little less than 1 percent—much higher than common ailments like the flu.
In the United States, at least 103 million COVID-19 cases have been reported since the pandemic began. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that at least 1.21 million people have officially died of the illness in the U.S., although the actual number of deaths could be higher.
COVID-19 rates across the U.S. are expected to grow over the winter holiday period.
What To Know
The CDC recommends that everyone aged 6 months and older should get a COVID-19 vaccine this season, meaning from October 2024 to September 2025.
This is because vaccine protection decreases over time and because the vaccines are updated to give people the best protection against new strains. A meta-analysis of seven COVID-19 studies, published by medical journal Cureus in August 2023, found that people who are unvaccinated are 2.46 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than those who are vaccinated.
The newest COVID-19 strain is called XEC, a subvariant of Omicron that is believed to be more transmissible, but milder than previous strains.
The CDC lists current likely symptoms of COVID-19 as:
- Fever or chills
- Cough
- Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing
- Sore throat
- Congestion or runny nose
- New loss of taste or smell
- Fatigue
- Muscle or body aches
- Headache
- Nausea or vomiting
- Diarrhea
Many of these symptoms overlap with other illnesses, such as flu, which is why experts advise taking a test to find out what the illness is. These can be mailed to people’s homes for free.
What People Are Saying
A spokesperson for the CDC previously told Newsweek: “As of December 13, 2024, COVID-19 activity is beginning to increase from low levels in some areas of the nation. Based on CDC modeled estimates of epidemic growth, we predict COVID-19 illness to increase in the coming weeks, as it usually does in the winter.”
Francois Balloux, a professor of computational systems biology at University College London in England, previously told Newsweek: “There is no evidence, and no particular reason to believe, that XEC causes different symptoms than all the other SARS-CoV-2 currently in circulation. XEC is not expected to cause more (or less) severe symptoms than other lineages currently in circulation.”
What Happens Next
The CDC will continue tracking COVID-19 data. A spike in illnesses is expected over the coming weeks. However, this is not unusual in winter time.
