California’s relentless FLiRT-fueled COVID surge is continuing to spawn infections at a dizzying rate, with coronavirus levels in wastewater reaching some of the highest levels seen since 2022. Wastewater readings are now higher than all but one COVID peak in the last two years, and have far surpassed those seen during the typical summertime seasonal spikes in the vaccine era. “This is a very large surge that we are seeing currently.
This is starting to rival, really, what we saw this past winter,” said Dr. Elizabeth Hudson, regional chief of infectious diseases at Kaiser Permanente Southern California. For the week that ended Aug.
10, coronavirus levels in sewage were 84% of last winter’s peak in California, according to estimates posted Friday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Coronavirus levels in wastewater have already blown past the peaks for the prior two summers, as well as the winter of 2022 to 23. “It’s so surprising to me that it hasn’t gone down yet,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious diseases specialist at UC San Francisco.
“It’s a little bit more of a prolonged season for California.” There are few signs that the surge is losing steam. The rate at which COVID-19 tests are coming back positive continues to rise.
In California, 14.7% of tests done at medical facilities came back positive over the week ending Aug. 12, a rate greater than was ever seen last winter and summer.
A month ago, the test positivity rate was.