A week ago, the three levels of government running this outbreak published three different numbers, and every one of them was six weeks behind the illnesses. That has not changed and it is not going to. What changed this week is the direction of travel. The federal counts finally started closing ground on the state counts, on one measure they passed them, and CDC moved a date that I have not seen reported anywhere.

Start with the date, because it is the news. On August 5, CDC’s investigation page said illnesses linked to this outbreak began on June 22 and continued through July 31. On August 13, the same page says they began on June 14 and continued through August 3. The window opened eight days at the front and three at the back. The back end is ordinary, because cases keep arriving. The front end is not ordinary at all. It means that as the interviews caught up, this investigation absorbed people who got sick more than a week before anybody previously placed the beginning of it.

June 14 matters because of what the recall actually reaches. FDA’s advisory says distribution of the recalled iceberg ran from June 29 through July 16, and the recall notice covers product made in that window. Symptoms of cyclosporiasis begin about a week after exposure, with a range of two days to two weeks, so the person who became ill on June 14 was most likely at a table around June 7. That is three weeks in front of the earliest lettuce in the recall. I wrote on August 8, working from FDA’s own enforcement file, that the recall window was set by shelf life rather than by contamination, because you cannot recall lettuce that has already been eaten or expired. The federal outbreak’s own start date has now moved out in front of the recall by more than two weeks.

Two honest cautions on that. A first onset date can rest on a single case, and a single case can be reclassified back out again next week. And CDC has not said whether June 14 comes from new interviews, a corrected record or a state reporting late, so I am not going to guess. What I can say is that the date is on CDC’s page in its own voice, and that FDA’s page does not carry it at all. FDA publishes only the last onset, August 3. The two agencies agree this week on how many people are sick. They are not both telling you when it started.

FDA published once in seven days, on Thursday night, and when it did the outbreak grew by half. It went from 6,358 illnesses, 278 hospitalizations and fifteen states on August 5 to 9,481 illnesses, 398 hospitalizations and seventeen states on August 13. Maine and Massachusetts joined. Confirmed distribution went from twenty-seven states to thirty-one, with nine more named as possible, and that finally closed the West Virginia contradiction the agency had carried for weeks, in which a state was on the outbreak list and missing from the distribution list at the same time. FDA also said two things it had never said before. Inspectors are inside the plant at Doctor Mora alongside Mexican officials, and customer records from the firm show recalled product was sold to consumers in Mexico.

On the same page that raised the count by half, FDA repeated that it remains confident all recalled iceberg lettuce is off the market. That is probably true, and it is not the same sentence as the outbreak being over, and the two keep getting read as though they were. The advisory address changed for the fourth time this summer, from five-state to nine-state to fifteen-state to simply multistate, which is sensible and also means every link in every story filed before Thursday now points at a dead version. The recall alert banner at the top of the new page still links to the five-state one. Taco Bell is now cited on the federal page as having stopped using this lettuce on July 17.

CDC’s surveillance page went from 10,468 laboratory-confirmed domestic cases on August 4 to 13,895 on August 11, up roughly a third in a week. Hospitalizations went from 517 to 740, up 43 percent. Travel-associated cases, which are counted separately and are not this outbreak, went from 1,341 to 1,530, and their hospitalizations from 46 to 58.

The number underneath those is the one worth watching, and it went the other way. The pile of cases awaiting confirmation fell, from more than 12,255 to more than 10,455. Confirmed cases rose by 3,427 while the pending pile dropped by 1,800, which means 1,627 of this week’s confirmations were genuinely new arrivals into the system and the rest came out of the backlog. That is the six-week lag starting to clear rather than the outbreak accelerating, and it is the first week all season that pile has shrunk. Anyone reading the jump to 13,895 as a surge in new illness has it backwards.

The clearest sign the federal count is catching up sits in the hospitalizations. A week ago the thirteen states that publish a hospital figure totalled 680 between them against CDC’s national 517. State health departments, counting by hand, were 163 hospitalizations ahead of the federal number for the entire country. Today the state floor is 734 and CDC is at 740. In one week CDC caught the states and went past them. That deserves saying plainly, because I spend most of my time here saying the opposite: the system works. It works six weeks late, which is the whole problem when the product has a nineteen-day shelf life, but it works, and the people doing that work are not the ones who decided how late it would be.

The states went from 26,755 on August 7 to 29,920 today, up 3,165 in seven days. Michigan alone was 1,424 of that, moving from 12,485 to 13,909 in its single Thursday update. Missouri added 482, Kansas 287, Indiana188, Florida 153, New York 145 and Nebraska 127. Maine appeared on the chart for the first time at 27. West Virginia posted this morning at 304 and revised its hospitalizations down from 21 to 20, the first time any state on this chart has revised a hospitalization figure downward. These numbers move in both directions and it is worth showing one that did.

Where the state governments are is a harder question than where the federal agencies are, because the states are not all in the same week. Fourteen of them added cases over the seven days. One revised down. Thirty-four published no new number at all. Kentucky is dated July 29 and Iowa July 30, both more than two weeks old. Nine states have published nothing since a press roundup on July 17. Illinois, Texas and Massachusetts did not move at all. The fifty-state total is always an assembly of numbers of different ages, which is exactly why I call it a floor and not an estimate.

Put the three together and the states are 5,570 cases ahead of CDC’s 24,350 confirmed and pending, where a week ago they were 4,032 ahead. The gap widened even though the federal count grew faster, because Michigan grew faster still. Nothing about that is a scandal. It is one state with a functioning laboratory and daily reporting sitting inside a national system built to move at a different speed.

Here is where all fifty of them stand tonight. The last column is whether FDA has confirmed that recalled Taylor Farms de Mexico lettuce reached that state. Thirty-one are confirmed, four more than a week ago, and nine further states and territories are marked as places the product may have gone.

29,920 is a floor, not an estimate. It is the sum of what fifty health departments have published, on schedules running from daily to never, counted at the bottom of any range a state reports. Where a state publishes two series, I use the one this chart has always used, which for Florida is the since-May-1 figure of 407 rather than the calendar-year total, and for New York the since-May-1 figure of 898 rather than 932. Ohio, Iowa, Kansas and Arkansas are calendar-year, because that is the series those states publish. The fourth column is that state’s entire 2025 total from CDC’s weekly notifiable-disease tables, a different series again, counting travel-associated cases across a full calendar year against a season still running.

Next week: CDC updates Tuesday. FDA has now gone eight days and then eight days again, so the next federal number lands somewhere around the twentieth and it will arrive in a lump that looks like a surge and is not. Missouri posts Sunday, Arkansas and Virginia Monday, North Carolina and Oklahoma Tuesday, Kansas and New York Wednesday, Michigan Thursday, West Virginia Friday. Yesterday’s chart has since taken West Virginia to 304, which leaves the floor eighty cases short of 30,000, and any one of those updates does it. The season closes on August 31, seventeen days from today, and because of the six-week lag the last cases of this season will not be counted until the middle of October.

The date is the thing I would go looking at. Somebody at CDC changed June 22 to June 14 this week, and whoever did it was doing the job right. It also means this outbreak now officially begins two weeks before the earliest lettuce the recall reaches, and the meal behind that first illness came three weeks before it. Inspectors are finally standing in Guanajuato. The question they went there to answer just got two weeks older.