Dr. Michael Hoerger doesn’t sound alarms lightly. He leads Population Sciences and Disparities at Tulane’s Cancer Center, and the figures he published Monday are hard to shrug off: roughly 1 in every 198 Americans is actively infectious with COVID-19 right now, with an estimated 1.6 million new infections happening each week. That number is climbing.
Ten hot spots dot the country. One of them is us.
Washington Makes the List
North-central Oregon down through the Washington coast is running high, according to Hoerger’s tracking — putting our stretch of the Pacific Northwest in the same company as outbreaks in southeast Alaska, Hawaii, and western Nevada. Texas has it worse than almost anywhere. Houston’s numbers likely undercount the real spread, since reporting lags there run one to three weeks behind. Nearby Hardin County is seeing transmission levels that echo the BA.1 Omicron wave, and the surge is spilling into western Louisiana. Southern Florida, the Utah-Idaho border, and southwestern Colorado round out the list at high or very high activity.
Here’s the strange part: the CDC’s state-level map doesn’t show a single state median in the high or very high range. That’s unusual for this time of year, when elevated numbers are typically the norm rather than the exception.
What Comes Next — Maybe Nothing, Maybe a Wave
Hoerger’s models sketch out a range. If cases climb at their typical seasonal pace, he projects a summer peak near 500,000 new daily infections by early September. A sharper correction could push that past 700,000. But there’s also a milder scenario, one where the peak tops out closer to 450,000 — low enough that, technically, it might not qualify as a “wave” at all. Hoerger uses 500,000 daily infections as his cutoff for that label, and 1 million for a “surge.”
He compares it to Pluto’s demotion from planet status: a technical distinction, not a verdict on danger. Even during quieter stretches, COVID keeps causing real harm — hospital stays, long-term complications, deaths that don’t make headlines. A missed “wave” designation doesn’t mean a safe summer.
For folks across the Wenatchee Valley, the takeaway isn’t panic. It’s awareness. Case counts here are elevated, the data lags behind real time, and the next six weeks will tell us whether this settles into something mild or turns into the kind of surge Hoerger has been warning about for months.
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