During summer months, this weekly respiratory illness report is available to paid subscribers only. Beginning in October with the onset of flu season, everyone gets the national overview for free, while paid subscribers receive bonus regional reports with state-by-state details to help you understand what's happening locally.

Respiratory Diseases

Influenza-like illness

Influenza activity is very low and pretty flat. Every state is reporting minimal activity.

Trips to the doctor for influenza-like illness remain very low, accounting for 1.2% of all outpatient visits last week nationally. Activity looks like it is slightly increasing, but I think this is spurious.

The two youngest cohorts (ages 0-4 and 5-24) are seeing slight upticks in outpatient visits. This likely reflects the start of the school year. These increases are minor and visits still remain very low for both groups. All other age groups reported very low outpatient rates of 1% or less.

Severe illness also remains very low, with hospitalizations stable at the 0.2 hospitalizations per 100,000 people.

COVID-19

We are seeing continued increases in this summer's Covid-19 wave. I don’t see any signs of peaking yet.

For context, current emergency department visit rates for Covid-19 stand at 1.2% and rising, but remain substantially below last summer's peak of 2.6%. This past winter, which was quite mild, peaked at 1.4% ED visits.

Hospitalizations are slowly rising as well, though they remain low overall, at 2.3 hospitalizations per 100,000 people. This past week, hospitalizations increased in over a dozen states, and there are a few states that are well above the national average: Hawaii (6.5), Florida, (5.5), and Washington, DC (4.0).