CDC Now Says 45 States and 423 Hospitalizations. Its Outbreak Page Still Says Nine States and 98. Add Up All Fifty States Yourself and the Cyclospora Head Count Is 18,347.

CDC published its weekly surveillance update on Tuesday, July 28, and it finally answered the two questions this map has been unable to answer for a week. How many states, and how many hospitalizations. The answers are 45 states and 423 hospitalizations. The agency updates that page once a week, so those figures stand until August 4.

Hold those next to what the same agency says on a different page. CDC’s outbreak page still reads nine states and at least 98 hospitalizations, and it has read that since July 24. One arm of CDC says 45 states and 423 people were sick enough to be admitted to a hospital, and another arm of CDC says nine states and 98. Both numbers are current. Both are correct. They differ by a factor of more than four because they are answering different questions, and only one of those questions was ever about a parasite. The other was about whether you ate at a Taco Bell.

The surveillance page carries 6,707 laboratory-confirmed domestic cases since May 1 — up roughly 2,500 from the July 21 update — plus more than 11,500 more that are not laboratory confirmed or still need international travel ruled out. The state count went from 41 to 45 in that same week. Sick people range in age from 1 to 98. No one has died. The agency estimates a six-week lag between when somebody gets sick and when the case reaches Atlanta, which means every one of these figures describes a June that is already over.

Here is the arithmetic that made tonight worth redrawing the map for. Add CDC’s own two figures together and the agency is describing 18,207 people. Add up what all fifty states publish about themselves, one state at a time, and the total is 18,347. Those two numbers were built by completely different methods — one is the federal surveillance system counting upward from laboratory reports, the other is me reading fifty state health department pages — and they land 140 apart, which is eight tenths of one percent. Two independent counts of this outbreak now agree on roughly eighteen thousand three hundred people. The number the government calls the outbreak is 1,947. That is under eleven percent of it.

Three states moved on the map today. Michigan crossed ten thousand — MDHHS reported 10,077 since June 22, up from 9,680 on Tuesday, in a state that identifies about fifty cases in an ordinary year. Indiana jumped to 1,092 from 954, with 218 of them in Allen County alone. And Florida is corrected from 106 to 158 — the 106 was a stale figure sitting in a wire roundup, while Florida’s own health department has reported 158 since May 1 across 36 counties, with Miami-Dade highest at 33.

Which raises the thing I want to flag about this table rather than bury in it. Fourteen of the fifty numbers below trace to a single national roundup, and that roundup has not been updated since July 17. Its Michigan entry still says 4,312. Its Ohio entry still says 177. Those two states have since gone to 10,077 and past 2,500. There is no reason to think Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah and Wisconsin are frozen in real life; they are frozen in the only public record I can find. Nebraska is the clearest example: it sits here at 49 from July 17, and this afternoon the Lincoln-Lancaster County Health Department alone reported 33 cases in July, 30 of them acquired in this country, and said that is above what it normally sees. One county is most of the state’s published total. Every one of those fourteen numbers is a floor.

The nine outbreak states now hold 15,590 of the 18,347. CDC’s outbreak count for those same nine states is 1,947. That leaves 13,643 people who are sick with this parasite, in the nine states the government has already named, who are not in the number the government publishes — because they apparently did not report eating at a Taco Bell. Eighty-seven percent of the illness inside the outbreak states still sits outside the outbreak count.

The other sixteen green states — the ones that received recalled Taylor Farms lettuce but are not among the nine — report 1,720 between them. Seventeen of those 1,720 have a named source (Taylor Farms lettuce), and all seventeen of them are in one hospital cafeteria in Keene, New Hampshire.

There is one more thing in the July 28 update worth sitting with. CDC now says 45 states have cases. Only 36 states publish a count of their own. That leaves at least nine states where the federal government knows there are confirmed cases and the residents of those states cannot look up how many. On the map below they are grey and yellow, and grey has never meant no illness. It has only ever meant no answer.

And we can now name some of them. The four states CDC added going from 41 to 45 were Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont and Delaware. Three of those four are grey on the map below, which is to say the federal government has confirmed cases in South Dakota, Vermont and Delaware and none of those three health departments publishes a number. A resident of Dover who wants to know how much of this is in Delaware has to read a CDC surveillance page to find out that the answer is not zero, and still cannot find out what it is.

Two questions crossed against each other for all fifty states: did the state receive iceberg lettuce that Taylor Farms de Mexico recalled on July 17, and does the state publish a 2026 Cyclospora count of its own.

Every case number on the map, the color it produced, and a link to where it came from.

A green state is not a state where the lettuce is proven to have sickened anybody, and a blue state is not a state where it is proven not to have. The map shows where product went and where illness was counted. What it keeps showing, five redraws in, is that the government’s outbreak number is not tracking the outbreak. It is tracking the questionnaire. CDC moved its own state count from 41 to 45 this week and its hospitalization count from something it would not publish to 423. The outbreak page did not move at all.