What's New
- Welcome back to our COVID stats page! After a long hiatus, we’ve resurrected it in light of this summer’s COVID spike. This iteration of the stats page focuses on wastewater and hospitalizations over case data, which has become less and less reliable as testing has declined and the government has eased off tracking.
- Both wastewater and hospitalization data suggest that COVID transmission is rising again. Nearly 500 NYC hospital patients tested positive for COVID on July 9, compared to 172 patients on the same day in May.
- The warm-weather uptick in cases is linked to the adorably named FLiRT variants, a family of substrains descended from the JN.1 lineage that drove this past winter’s spike.
- Luckily, we haven’t reached the transmission heights of early 2024 – at least not yet. But it’s still a good idea to wear a mask indoors, particularly if you’re at risk of severe disease, according to the city's health department.
The charts, tables and maps on this page refresh with the latest data weekly or biweekly, but we only update the article’s text occasionally. The most recent text update happened on July 11.
Want different metrics on this page? Please send any questions or comments to [email protected].
Recent Trends
COVID transmission has climbed steadily since the spring, according to data from hospital patients’ COVID tests. New York state’s wastewater concentrations have held steady so far, but city wastewater data shows that some parts of the city are in the 80th percentile or above compared to past COVID levels.
New York City’s hospitalization rate is elevated compared to last summer’s figures, but it hasn’t quite caught up to the most recent December-January peak. NYC Health and Hospitals, the city’s public hospital system, reinstated its mask mandate as of last December, the New York Daily News reported. And in July, the city health department re-upped its recommendation that New Yorkers wear masks indoors.
Variants
In recent weeks, the viral landscape has been dominated by the “FLiRT” variants, a collective name for a family of substrains whose technical names start with “JN” and “KP.” The capital letters in FLiRT are shorthand for the mutations that help these substrains cling to our cells and fend off antibodies, according to the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.
There’s not much available research yet on the most recent COVID vaccine’s effectiveness against the new variants. But the shots can still protect against severe disease, hospitalization and death, according to the CDC.
