Source: CDC. Materials developed by CDC are available on its website at no charge. This use of the materials and links does not imply endorsement of ENT Daily Dispatch or its products and services by CDC, ATSDR, HHS or the United States Government.
A broad respiratory category and a virus-specific emergency-department percentage can sit beside each other on CDC’s dashboard without describing the same thing. For an ENT readership, the useful first step is to name the question each display answers before using it as context for a professional report.
CDC’s acute respiratory illness (ARI) measure covers a nonspecific range of respiratory diagnoses recorded in emergency departments. It classifies the share of ED visits into five activity levels, from Very Low to Very High. Its published method uses low-activity reference periods from the 2023–2024, 2024–2025 and 2025–2026 surveillance years to construct the 2026–2027 categories.
The pathogen-specific charts ask a narrower question: what percentage of all ED visits in a week is associated with COVID-19, influenza or RSV? CDC displays these separately for each virus. A category label and a percentage are therefore different forms of description; one should not be substituted for the other in a headline or briefing.
Display eligibility is another distinction. CDC’s methods say a pathogen percentage may still appear even when an activity category is not displayed. Sub-state categories are subject to participation and visit-count conditions. An absent category cannot therefore be read as evidence of zero illness. That is an interpretation of the published display rules, rather than a finding about any particular area.
A professional summary should identify the measure, geography and reporting period together. Before drawing a comparison, check whether both observations use the same indicator and display rules. This visit-based surveillance context does not establish appointments, procedures or demand at an ENT practice. No current-week estimate or patient-risk assessment is presented here.
The references were observed October 15, 2026. The summary carries a Published label of October 2 and Updated and Reviewed labels of October 9; the methods carry a Published label of August 14 and Updated and Reviewed labels of October 9. Those page dates, whose times and timezones are not given, do not independently date the underlying observations. This is a new explanation of public documentation, not a new CDC activity announcement.
The distinction helps ENT professionals describe respiratory surveillance precisely without treating an emergency-department display as a measure of practice demand.
Go to the source.
CDC — Illness Levels Over Time: public methods and data notes ↗CDC — Respiratory Illnesses Data Channel ↗CDC — Use of Agency Materials ↗This methods explainer describes public reference records. It does not establish study results, a product’s current authorization or treatment suitability.
