By Deidre McPhillips | CNN
Covid-19 certainly didn’t take a vacation this summer. Virus levels in the US have been on the rise for weeks, but it’s hard to know exactly how widely it’s spreading.
Federal data suggests that the current increases have stayed far below earlier peaks and notable surges. But judging by word of mouth among family, friends and coworkers, it can seem like everyone knows someone who’s sick with Covid-19 right now.
“We have several folks down with Covid, unfortunately,” one health-focused nonprofit told CNN when seeking comment for this story.
Rates of severe disease may be staying at relatively low levels, but experts agree that there are probably more infections than the current surveillance systems can capture.
“There is more transmission out there than what the surveillance data indicates,” said Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists. “And we should be paying attention to it, because we are starting to see an increase.”
From 2020 to 2022, the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation produced regular estimates of Covid-19 case rates and projections for trends. But the research institute paused that modeling in December.
All of the measures that factored into the model had stopped being reported or had changed in some way, said Ali Mokdad, professor of health metrics sciences and chief strategy officer of population health at the University of Washington.
“The surveillance system was not adequate anymore to capture changes in Covid-19,” he said. “We felt that the margin of error became really too big for us to make a prediction that we could stand by and defend.”
Mokdad declined to quantify an estimate for current case counts, but he said he’s been getting lots of calls and questions about Covid-19 recently — similar to what he experienced around the end of last year. In mid-December, the US Centers for Disease…
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