ATLANTA — The numbers at the Northeast Georgia Health System and across the country don’t lie. The COVID-19 summer surge is here.
“COVID has become part of our lives, but we never took our eyes off it,” said infectious disease physician Supriya Mannepalli.
Since the pandemic’s beginning in 2020, the Northeast Georgia Health System has administered COVID-19 tests to patients across all settings, including outpatient and long-term care facilities, to monitor transmission rates. As recently as April, roughly 2 percent of the tests came back positive.
“Now, we’re at 22 percent positivity, and this trend is going up,” Mannepalli said. “There is definitely a surge going on.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention no longer tracks COVID-19 case numbers but estimates the trend of the virus spread based on emergency room visits. According to the CDC, in the week that ended July 13, Georgia reported 1.1 percent of emergency room visits were diagnosed as COVID-19, a 40 percent increase from the previous week — a high percentage that reflects a rise in the small number of emergency department cases. Nationally, 1.6 percent of all emergency visits were due to COVID-19, up 16 percent from the previous week.
Even President Joe Biden couldn’t dodge the outbreak. The president returned to the White House on Wednesday after several days of isolation at his Delaware home following a diagnosis last week of COVID-19. The White House reported last week that his symptoms were mild and that he responded quickly to the antiviral Paxlovid.
The virus seems to be causing fewer emergency visits this summer than last year. During last summer’s peak, 2.5 percent of emergency department patients were diagnosed with COVID-19. It accounted for 3.5 percent of emergency patients in 2022, and 7 percent during summer 2021.
A summertime COVID-19 outbreak has become the norm since the pandemic, tied to people enjoying holiday travel and gathering indoors where it’s cooler. The virus has shown a seasonal surge twice each year, spiking in July and August, and again in December and January.
The CDC tracks a sample of over 300 hospitals in 13 states to estimate COVID-19 activity. For the week ended July 13, the agency reports a rate of 2 hospitalizations per 100,000 people. The highest rate of hospitalizations this year was reported for the week ended Jan. 6, when 7.6 hospitalizations per 100,000 people was reported.
Health experts and doctors have said they expect this summer’s COVID-19 illnesses to be milder than some past versions, but the latest iterations of the ever-evolving coronavirus seem to be more contagious.
At the Northeast Georgia Health System, Mannepalli said milder infections are the norm, with people presenting flu-like symptoms including coughing, runny nose, muscle aches, fever and sometimes sore throat. In more severe cases, shortness of breath can also be an issue.
