Lately, I've found myself struggling to understand this particular phase of the pandemic.

On Monday, a federal judge voided the transportation mask mandate.

But at the same time, both from people I know, getting sick, news stories, and tracking

data, COVID cases are ticking up.

So I called up Catherine Wu.

She's a reporter for the Atlantic, and COVID is one of the things she covers.

All right, I think I need to ask you the question, are we in a wave?

Oh, I think that invites another question, which is what is a wave?

Catherine has a PhD in microbiology and immunobiology.

Her COVID coverage is indispensable.

It's infused with a level of understanding and rigor that you don't always find in health

news.

It's not really a term with a formal epidemiological or mathematical definition.

It's almost a kind of you know it when you see it sort of thing, but you can imagine it

is kind of a deviation away from the norm.

Being able to see that deviation, to quantify it, takes data.

And in the US, good data about COVID cases has gotten harder and harder to come by.

We are kind of in a data disaster right now, as one person put it to me recently.

The way that we track waves is generally by tracking cases, documented infections.

And the way that we've done this over the past couple of years is to test people.

But now a lot of community testing sites have shut down.

Some people are testing themselves at home, but that data almost never gets reported

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