It’s been a while since we’ve had a COVID-19 update, hasn’t it? Once upon a time, you couldn’t go a whole day without seeing updated death tolls and infection rates. Now, despite the continuing mutations of the virus into certain FLiRT-y subvariants, we barely hear about these numbers at all.

So how is the US doing? Thanks to the CDC’s updates, we can easily find out – and the answer is a spotty picture, split by state and region.

Test positivity – that is, the proportion of COVID tests recorded coming back positive – is recorded by the CDC across ten geographical regions. And coming in at number one, with the highest proportion of tests coming back positive, is region six: Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. 

This group of states has been seeing increasing numbers of tests returning positive results: almost one in four over the past two weeks, versus 21.8 percent in the two weeks before that.

Now not for nothing but that group does include states with some of the lowest vaccine takeup among adults - Texas, we're looking at you and your law against vaccine mandates here.

Of course, correlation is not causation, but it kind of behooves us to point out the fact that getting your booster shots can more than halve your risk of contracting symptomatic COVID-19. Just putting that out there.

Now, these central southern states may have the highest proportion of positive tests, but it’s not the worst-hit by every metric. Travel east, into region four – the group comprising Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida – and we see what looks at first glance like a fairly low rate of positive tests, at 16.1 percent within the past two weeks. 

However, compare that figure to the levels seen two weeks beforehand – just 12.5 percent, or one in eight – and these states actually turn out to have the highest increase in positives through the past month, with a 29 percent uptick in cases.

So, is there any good news? Well, yes: over in California, Nevada, and Arizona, the proportion of positive tests has actually seen a significant drop, moving from 19.1 percent – nearly one in five – down to 16.9 percent, or just a bit more than one in six. That’s a decrease of 12 percent. 

Meanwhile, regions two and eight, in the northwest and mountain regions of the continent, are seeing an uptick in the number of positive cases, but not by much: their rates of increase are only around 5.4 percent and 7.3 percent respectively.

More good news can be found in the hospitalization rates from COVID-19 infections. Despite a surge of highly infectious FLiRT subvariants since the start of April, this more extreme outcome is remaining low – if not actually decreasing. The proportion of emergency department visits diagnosed as COVID-19 related range between “less than one in 30” and “so few that we literally can’t provide a figure” for all but eight states (we’ll let you guess which ones), and overall visits are down 2.6 percent country-wide.

Deaths, meanwhile, are similarly reassuring. A handful of states are experiencing a surge in COVID-related deaths, but none are seeing more than 3.4 percent of total deaths being caused by the disease. Everywhere else has rates at one in fifty or fewer, and more than half of the states have had deaths from COVID-19 in the single digits over the past week. Overall, there’s no change in either direction.

In total, then, COVID-19 cases in the US are rising – generally, but not everywhere – but the danger levels of extreme outcomes are not increasing wildly. That said, it’s still a very good idea to keep up with your booster shots, and practice common sense (and provably effective) measures like self-isolation if you do test positive.