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There will be a spike in COVID-19 cases the summer of 2026, as there have been each summer, according to a North Carolina expert.
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Dr. David Wohl, an infectious diseases expert with UNC Health, said there has been a spike in COVID-19 cases each summer since the virus first spread.
“Every summer, basically, of the pandemic, we’ve seen increases in cases in the summertime. I think that gets a little bit less attention than the wintertime spike that occurs,” Wohl said.
Possible COVID-19 symptoms, according to the CDC, include:
“I think what people don’t recognize is that COVID still does cause quite a bit of suffering,” Wohl said.
Wohl said there has been an increase in cases of XFG, an Omicron variant sometimes called Stratus.
“The wild landscape that the virus is circulating in has also changed, making it harder for the virus in many ways, because we have more and more immunity from repeated infections and from our vaccinations,” Wohl said. “It has to get through the maze of our immunity in order to infect more and more people, and that’s of course happening, so we’re putting pressure on the virus to evolve, and that’s going to happen no matter what.”
The BA.3.2 variant of COVID-19 also garnered attention in 2025 and 2026. Like the insect, the Cicada COVID-19 variant has shown a pattern of disappearing and reappearing months later, The Charlotte Observer previously reported.
It was first identified in 2024, detected in someone travelling to the United States in 2025. NCDHHS had no updates to share about the Cicada variant with the Observer as of June 9.
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“We definitely could see a little bit of an increase in that (Cicada variant) right now, but other than its sort of fanciful name, the attention to Cicada has been mostly just cautionary. It makes up a very small percentage of the COVID cases that we are detecting now,” Wohl said.
The Cicada variant has the potential to reduce protection from a vaccine or previous infection because of the number of mutations. These mutations could make it more contagious, but NCDHHS said vaccination should still protect against the variant.
“We are in a different place with COVID-19 than we were earlier during the pandemic. A high percentage of the population has some protective immunity against COVID-19 and we have the tools, including vaccination, testing and treatment, to manage COVID-19 as we do for other respiratory illnesses,” NCDHHS Press Assistant James Werner wrote in an email.
North Carolina no longer tracks COVID-19 variant data in specimens collected from patients.
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This story was originally published June 17, 2026 at 4:47 PM with the headline “NC doctor anticipates summer COVID spike. Watch for these symptoms.”
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