US COVID activity continued to decline in many areas, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today in its latest updates.
Test positivity for COVID was 13.5% last week, down from 14.9% the week before.
Hospitalizations continue to decline but remain highest in seniors, followed by adults ages 50 to 64 and children younger than age 4 years.
Emergency department visits dropped about 19% compared to the previous week and are now at low levels across much of the country.
Deaths held steady, and provisional data show that the CDC received reports of 563 COVID deaths for the week ending September 14.
Detections of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater are still high nationally, according to CDC tacking. The highest levels remain in the West, followed by the Midwest and the South. However, all regions show downward trends.
The latest data from WastewaterSCAN, a national wastewater monitoring system based at Stanford University in partnership with Emory University, show that detections are still high nationally and in the Midwest, with no significant up or down trend over the past 3 weeks.
Very low uptake of COVID, flu vaccines in adults
In its updates today, the CDC also had some respiratory virus vaccine uptake estimates. So far, about 2.8% of adults have received the updated COVID vaccine, and 6.8% have received a seasonal flu vaccine.
Among adults ages 75 and older, 33.1% have reported ever receiving a respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine.