COVID-19 cases are dropping in the U.S. and mask mandates are being repealed all over. Yet over a third of the wastewater sample sites across the U.S. showed rising COVID-19 levels in the first 10 days of March. So is COVID-19 going away or not?

For the experts, there are quite a few reasons to believe Americans shouldn’t let their guard down just yet. "The world has decided COVID is over for some reason — and that really worries me,” said Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology at Yale School of Medicine. "Lifting all of these mandates so quickly is asking for trouble.”

State of play