A few articles caught my eye over the last couple of days, they mentioned a sharp rise in Covid and other respiratory infections lately. I suspect that it’s more the “other respiratory infections” that have seen more of a jump.
I wondered about this, so pulled out the Case Demograpgics master spreadsheet (ESR to HNZ data, up to 9 June 2025) and plotted the cases by age (because by Vaccination count ended on February 24, 2024) over the past 2 years, it looks relatively gradual.
Over the past 4 weeks, the greatest increase has been about 0.21%. Thats lower than more than 300 other instances (days where it increased more than that, or weeks) since February 2021. But it might actually be a sharp jump? Let’s check.
You can click on the items in the Legend in the interactive chart below. While it’s interesting that the 60-69 has overtaken the 0-9 by a lot, and 50-59 have overtaken 10-19 and 30-39 have overtaken 20-29 (all the first lot of those comparisons CAN get boosted, all of the second lot CANNOT get boosted), there isn’t what I’d call a “Sharp jump” in Covid cases.
Maybe it’s in the other respiratory illnesses? We can check the ESR Dashboard.
Influenza-like Illnesses (in the Community): The blue line is what we are looking at. Has it spiked or flattened? It’s flattened a little bit.
Severe Acute Respiratory Infections (in Hospitals): Blue lines for Any Cause SARI, Influenza Positive, and Covid Positive. Are any spiking? No.. they’re doing the opposite. Flu was overall trending up.
Viruses Detected in Testing: It kind of looks to me like it’s Influenza (All) and Rhinovirus that make up the vast majority, with RSV being much bigger than Covid over the recent weeks. Covid’s in orange. The GP sampling wodge of orange is a little bigger than it has been, but that value? It’s 3. THREE positive tests out of 26 by GPs.
Conclusion
There’s not really enough evidence for me to lump Covid in with the statement.
