What's the latest in respiratory virus trends? October 31, 2025
Some data sources have been paused recently, but novel data streams can fill in the gaps using near-real-time data
As we move deeper into Fall in the United States, respiratory tract infections caused by viruses, like influenza, COVID-19, and RSV, are starting to trend up. There are a number of data sources we can use to track these trends. Typically, CDC publishes data on a number of metrics including hospitalizations, emergency department visits, and positive tests caused by these viruses. However, these data sources are currently on pause and were last updated September 26. Beyond the Federal data, PopHIVE also has trend data from Epic Cosmos, a large database of electronic health records, from Google searches, and from our partners at Delphi. Explore the data yourself with the PopHIVE.org respiratory disease dashboard.
What’s the latest: October 31, 2025
RSV (respiratory syncytial virus)
RSV epidemics usually start the earliest in the Southeastern US and then spread like a wave during the subsequent months to the north and west. his year, we can see this pattern playing out as usual, with Florida starting to increase in the Google Health Trends and Epic Cosmos data.
In a given location, the epidemic tends to hit children a few weeks earlier than adults, and we can see that in the Epic data, where emergency department visits in infants is already trending up sharply, but activity hasn’t picked up in adults (the lines are re-scaled so that you can compare the trends—RSV isn’t tested frequently in adults, so it is rarely recorded as a cause of illness):
Zooming out, we can see that much of the country still has low rates of RSV according to Epic Cosmos (3 week moving average, through October 11)
COVID-19
COVID-19 hit a peak in early/mid-September. Since then, viral activity has fallen sharply, as shown in our latest data from Delphi (doctor’s visits and hospitalizations through October 18) and Epic Cosmos (.
Influenza
Flu rates remain low across the country:
