Is ‘Silent’ COVID Surge Brewing This Holiday Season? Warning Issued!

United States: With the arrival of holidays and travel season at its peak, COVID-19 is lurking again across the country, as the expert’s report suggested,

More about the news

However, during winter, the COVID surge started much later this year, and some experts are speaking about a ‘silent’ wave rising during the holiday season.

It’s called “silent” because this winter wave comes from a very low COVID activity this fall, and thus, many people are not aware that COVID levels have increased over the last two weeks, the latest weekly wastewater data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicate.

People may not realize their risk of infection is higher and don’t get tested if they have mild symptoms. Therefore, they will go to holiday parties, travel, etc., and spread the virus.

What more has the data revealed?

According to Michael Hoerger, Ph.D., associate professor at Tulane University School of Medicine and public health expert on tracking COVID-19 trends, “There’s a good chance that a lot of people are going to get sick in the next couple of weeks and be unaware of it. Most people are not tracking CDC data, and so their only way of knowing whether we’re in a wave is if they’ve gotten sick,” TODAY.com reported.

As the holidays arrive and travel peaks, COVID-19 is on the rise again across the country. However, this year's winter COVID wave is off to a later start than usual, and some experts are warning about a potential "silent" surge in transmission. https://t.co/9l5PTtSukY

— NBC10 Boston (@NBC10Boston) December 26, 2024

However, the data are still insufficient to observe that the US has a large COVID surge, yet Hoerger points out that the country continues to be in its 10th COVID wave since the onset of the pandemic.

Levels of COVID-19 spread

While present in wastewater now, the COVID-19 virus was at somewhat lower levels than at this time last winter. However, there has been a clear increase in the past two weeks, as the data from the CDC shows.

And they will probably go on rising, experts believe.

“This is a very risky time in terms of lots of people interacting indoors, so we don’t really know how quickly transmission can pick up,” Hoerger added.

As per Dr. Jonathan Yoder, deputy director of the CDC Division of Infectious Disease Readiness and Innovation, “As of Friday, December 20, COVID-19 levels in wastewater are moderate nationally, as TODAY.com reported.

The CDC no longer reports the number of COVID cases in the US each day. Instead, they use wastewater surveys, test positivity, and emergency department visit data to estimate the transmissibility of COVID in the US.

The test positivity for COVID is at 5.6 percent, or an increase of 0.5 percent from the week before, according to the CDC.

COVID-associated emergency department encounters and deaths are also climbing at an extremely marginal rate.

According to Hoerger, the director of the Pandemic Mitigation Collective, which employs the COVID-19 forecasting model, the estimate as of December 16 is that one person in 64 (1.6 percent) of the population are actively infectious in the US, and there are about 750 thousand new everyday positive tests, and these figures are increasing.