👇🏻 COVID is actively circulating right now and climbing in a lot of places. As of the CDC’s September eighteenth update, activity is elevated and increasing nationally, with infections growing or likely growing in twenty-seven states. Wastewater levels have been rising since July, strongest in the South, West, and along the Atlantic seaboard, and a Reuters tally put a single-day record of more than eighty-four thousand new cases on Friday. Hospitalizations are still low overall compared with earlier pandemic waves, and the dominant strains are descendants of XFG that most people’s immune systems already recognize. It’s the usual late-summer wave, just a bit later this year.