The milestone came and went with little fanfare.

After more than four years with COVID-19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported the lowest new, weekly coronavirus hospitalizations since the pandemic began. There was no celebration or publicized statement. It’s safe to say that most Americans had no clue about the occurrence – though that may just be how they’d prefer it.

The CDC started publishing weekly COVID-19 hospitalizations in August 2020, so the data doesn’t represent the entire pandemic. Still, experts agree that it’s a noteworthy trend, and likely accurate as wastewater viral activity levels are low and deaths are also declining.

“The really good news is we’re really hitting the lowest numbers in terms of hospitalizations and deaths since the pandemic began,” says Dr. Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota.

There were over 5,600 new COVID-19 hospitalizations during the week ending on April 20, according to CDC data. That’s compared to a peak of more than 150,000 new, weekly hospitalizations during January 2022.

“As long as people continue to be mindful of those in our community who are at greatest risk for severe illness and death from COVID, this is shaping up to be a summer where we’ll continue to watch the data, but right now I’m seeing a lot of positive signs in the data,” says Dr. Keri Althoff of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Notably, it could be one of the last weeks of full COVID-19 hospital admissions data as the requirement for hospitals to report the figures as well as capacity and occupancy ended this week.

“These hospitals are no longer required to report certain COVID-19 and acute respiratory illness-related data to HHS through CDC’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN), but they may do so voluntarily,” a CDC spokesperson said in a statement to U.S. News.

Althoff says it bothers her to see the decrease in data, but she acknowledges that the move reduces reporting burdens on hospitals.

“I’m an epidemiologist,” Althoff says. “I would love to see all this data. So does it bother me? Of course it does. That being said, I think we also have to recognize that this is a balance, and collecting and submitting those data – that is not just done by thin air. That is done by people.”

Many in the U.S. initially gauged the pandemic through the number of new infections. That shifted as hospitalization and death data became more reliable and states were no longer required to report infection numbers to the CDC. So where does the focus shift now?

“Wastewater data is extremely important and valuable to understanding where the virus actually is infecting humans across our country,” Althoff says.

Wastewater viral activity, which can help track both symptomatic and asymptomatic infections, is currently considered “minimal” on the national level, according to the CDC.

The change in hospitalization reporting is just the latest hit to a dwindling pool of COVID-19 data that highlights much of the country’s overall shift in thinking about the coronavirus.

A Pew Research Center survey published in March found that about 27% of U.S. adults were somewhat or very concerned about getting a serious case of COVID-19 that requires hospitalization. While that’s down dramatically from the start of the pandemic, it represents a considerable amount of Americans who are still concerned about COVID-19.

Despite those concerns, uptake of the latest COVID-19 vaccine has been limited, with less than 23% of adults rolling up their sleeves for it, according to CDC data. That’s considerably less than the uptake for the flu shot, which was 48% for adults.

As with many trends that emerged during the pandemic, the gap is more pronounced when broken down by political party. According to the survey, Republicans were more than twice as likely to report getting the flu shot as they were for the updated COVID-19 shot. Democrats showed a “more modest” difference between uptake of the two shots, according to the survey.

Summer can be a gamble for COVID-19. After all, some have seen waves of the coronavirus while others have not.

So what can the U.S. expect from COVID-19 this summer?

Ensemble forecasts from the CDC show that hospitalizations are likely to continue the downward trend in the near future.

Predicting coronavirus trends in advance is no easy task as the virus is still not considered seasonal like the flu.

“The only thing that one could assume maybe calling it seasonal is that it has occurred in all four seasons,” Osterholm says.

Additionally, the continued decline could always be altered by a new, problematic variant.

“The trend however, though, will likely stay unless we see the emergence of a new variant that is substantially more infectious and has the potential to evade the immune protection we have,” Osterholm says.

Another COVID-19 strain is quietly starting to take over in the U.S.

After months on top, JN.1’s prevalence in the U.S. is now second to one of its descendents, KP.2.

KP.2 was responsible for 1 in 4 new COVID-19 infections in the CDC latest estimates. The World Health Organization recently cited the strain in its recommendation to change COVID-19 vaccines to combat JN.1.

“The trajectory of further SARS-CoV-2 evolution indicates that JN.1 will likely be the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 variants, in the near term,” the organization said in a statement. “However, the timing, specific mutations and antigenic characteristics, and the potential public health impact of newly emerged (e.g. KP.2) and future variants remain unknown.”

It’s unclear if the new strain will eventually lead to an increase in COVID-19 cases, but it’s always a possibility with a quickly rising variant.

“I think this is one where we’re kind of at a point of necessary humility, and acknowledging that we don’t know what it means, but, surely at this point, there is no evidence that it’s increasing the disease burden in our communities,” Osterholm says.