NBC Tick-related hospital visits reached their peak in May, the highest since 2019. While working as a youth camp doctor in upstate New York earlier this summer, Dr. Matt Harris noticed he was removing a dozen ticks from campers each day, more than in years prior.
Harris, an emergency medicine doctor at Northwell Medicine, said summer camp isn’t the only place seeing a surge of tick bites: He and other doctors have been seeing more people coming into the ER because of ticks. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this July has seen more ER visits for tick bites so far than the past eight Julys. Tick-related hospital visits typically peak in May. This May, tick bites accounted for 134 out of every 100,000 ER visits, the highest level since 2019, the CDC says. Rates were highest in the Northeast and the Midwest.
Harris and other doctors said this rise in ER visits may be due to increased awareness about ticks.
“I think because there’s so much out there in the media about this, people are coming in before they get engorged,” Harris said. “So they’re coming in when the tick is small.”