JONATHAN M. METSCH, Dr.P.H. – Tracking Emerging Public Health Challenges – August24, 2026 – COVID
“Why COVID-19 Is Spreading This Summer
The regional pattern aligns with a June 2026 CDC outlook, which anticipated more summer transmission in Southern and Western areas that experienced comparatively little COVID-19 activity during the 2025-2026 winter. According to the agency, those regions may now have less recent immunity from infection. The Northeast and Midwest experienced more winter activity and were expected to have smaller summer increases.
That explanation remains tentative. COVID-19 can peak in summer or winter, with timing varying from one region to another. Researchers continue to examine how waning immunity, new variants, human behavior, and environmental conditions interact to shape each wave.” (2)
“As summer winds down, several diseases are winding up, like Covid-19 infections and rare mosquito-borne illnesses. Unfortunately, we can expect the same for vaccine-preventable diseases, according to new CDC data.”
“Covid-19 wave is still small, but growing
Covid-19 levels (e.g., emergency department visits, wastewater transmission), remain low nationally but continue to rise in every state. The South and the West are the leaders, which is typical this time of year.
By the end of this wave, we can expect 10-15% of people to get infected. Thankfully, the number of hospitalizations isn’t nearly as high with population immunity, but Covid-19 remains serious for older adults, infants, and people who are immunocompromised.
Are Covid-19 metrics still useful for tracking waves? Yes, when used together. It’s true that fewer people and places are testing, but the positivity rate reflects the share of tests, which helps show the direction of trends. For wastewater, the number of sites has dipped slightly (from ~1,500 to 1,300), and funding is hanging on by a thread, but our systems still cover ~144 million people.” (3)
“Hantavirus. Ebola. West Nile. Measles. And, of course, cyclospora — that stomach parasite making people miserable across the country. Americans have plenty to worry about this summer.
But remember COVID-19? It may not be surprising that many people may have almost forgotten about COVID. Unfortunately, COVID hasn’t forgotten about us.
“We’re now in the midst of a growing summer surge of COVID here in the United States,” says Dr. John Brooks, an infectious disease doctor at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., who used to work at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “I think most of us kind of feel like it’s fading away and are certainly very grateful for that. But nationally we’re seeing it ticking up pretty much everywhere.”
The virus is spreading the most again in the South and West, but is also on the rise in the Northeast and Midwest. The good news is the virus is still at very low levels. And so far this summer’s wave seems to be continuing the trend of getting milder each year, sending fewer people to the hospital and causing fewer deaths.
“What we’re seeing is very likely evidence of growing herd immunity if you will,” Brooks says. “More and more people have had one or more infections that give them some immunity against the virus and have had more than one vaccination, or maybe both. And all of that really has begun to offer us a lot of protection.”
Now, that doesn’t mean people don’t have to worry about COVID at all anymore. The disease still makes lots of people feel awful for a week or two, foiling their summer vacations and forcing them to miss work and school.
And COVID can still cause serious disease for some people, sending them to emergency rooms, causing hospitalizations and even sometimes still causing death.
“COVID-19 is still dangerous, particularly for older adults, infants and people who are immunocompromised,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. And that is a lot of Americans. “In a typical office, if you have 20 colleagues, it’s likely that one or two of them have some degree of immunocompromise. So it’s very common that people have risk factors that make COVID-19 dangerous.”” (4)
“For all the zeal Congress has shown in investigating America’s response to the covid-19 pandemic, it has been strangely uninterested in exploring a basic question: why did so many Americans die relative to the numbers who succumbed to the virus in other rich countries? Understanding the answer would seem relevant to guarding against the next, inevitable pandemic.” (5)
Inter-hospital ICU-to-ICU transfer of critically ill COVID-19 patients is not associated with increased mortality: a systematic review with exploratory meta-analysis, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-62965-7
Mutated COVID-19 variant could be behind surge in SF virus levels, By Gillian Mohney, https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/sf-covid-levels-22386669.php
More than six years on, we still cannot say for certain how the Covid-19 pandemic began. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/08/17/opinion/covid-pandemic-lab-leak-prevention.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
1.COVID Is Back: Does Anyone Care Anymore?, by Joe Graedon, https://www.peoplespharmacy.com/articles/covid-is-back-does-anyone-care-anymore
2.COVID-19 Is Spreading Again as a Summer Wave Grows Across the U.S.,By Anastasia Scott, https://www.discovermagazine.com/covid-19-is-spreading-again-as-a-summer-wave-grows-across-the-u-s-49550
3.Covid-19 and dengue creeping up, vaccinations creeping down, a new mRNA flu vaccine, and more, by Katelyn Jetelina, https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/covid-19-and-dengue-creeping-up-vaccinations
4.Is there a summer COVID-19 surge this year? Yep, it’s ramping up again, by Rob Stein, https://www.npr.org/2026/08/14/nx-s1-5927115/summer-vaccine-covid-19-surge
5. The real covid-19 scandal is still unfolding, https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/08/20/the-real-covid-19-scandal-is-still-unfolding
curated by Jonathan M. Metsch, Dr.P.H.
Clinical Professor of Environmental Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai