As kids start heading back to school and the summer season draws to a close, Houston area doctors hope the surge of COVID-19 cases nationwide and locally will plateau.

“The hope would be we’ll start to see a decline now in the amount of wastewater virus recovery, and therefore transmission,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

According to the city of Houston’s wastewater monitoring dashboard, the viral load has decreased from 333 percent, where it was on July 22, to 293 percent as of July 29. Hotez described the decline as a “slight dip,” but inconsequential to indicate whether it would continue to trend this way.

The number of cases nationwide — and here in Texas — remains high as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a 2 percentage point increase in positive tests within the final week of July.

And internationally, over 40 athletes competing at the Olympics in Paris have tested positive for the virus. U.S. track star Noah Lyles recently confirmed he had COVID-19 after collapsing at the end of his 200 meter race.

Hotez said that without everyone who has symptoms testing for the virus and limited hospitalization data, it is difficult to determine whether the downside of this surge is imminent. However, he noted the increase in cases has reached its peak.

“It took a long time to get there. It’s almost as though — to me — there’s just normal cadence and biorhythm of these variants,” Hotez added. “As one starts to go down, another one slowly begins to pop up and take its place.”

The FLiRT variants, originating from the previous JN.1 dominant Omicron variant, are linked to the recent increase in infections. Locally, the Texas Department of Health and Human Services reported that KP.2.3—one of these variants—was responsible for 29.4 percent of the cases detected across the state within the final week of July.

Nationally, the CDC tracked KP.3.11 — another of the FLiRT variants — as the dominant variant, as it was tied to 27.8 percent of positive cases in the U.S. within the previous two weeks.


“People don’t seem to be taking the peaks and valleys of this pandemic very seriously at this point,” Hotez said. “I don’t see a lot of people masking, and people, often, are not even testing if they are symptomatic.”

“COVID-19 is still a bad actor. It's not like a typical respiratory virus. It causes thromboembolic phenomena with heart attacks and strokes. It causes long COVID,” he added. “So, I do think it is important to take it as a very serious infection. If you can avoid it, you should do so at all costs.”

According to Hotez, the updated vaccine should be available within the next few weeks. He expects that Novavax will single out the JN.1 variant, and the two mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna could target one of the FLiRT variants.

“I wish it were available now while we're surging,” Hotez said.