There are worse viruses out there, but norovirus stands out for some of the more grotesque elements of its symptoms. As Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker wrote in The Guardian in 2013, “Everywhere the norovirus goes it leaves vast steaming lakes of freshly expelled vomit in its wake.” (The prose gets more evocative from there.) And as of mid-December 2025, the next destination to suffer from such a nasty outbreak might just be the Golden State,
That, at least, is one of the biggest takeaways from an unnerving Los Angeles Times article by Rong-Gong Lin II. The Times cites comments made by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, which is seeing increased evidence of norovirus infections in wastewater tests.
The likelihood of more people contracting norovirus could work in tandem with a more contagious strain of the virus to give California and other states in the western U.S. an uptick in, well, people becoming violently ill. (Or possibly other states in the U.S., full stop: ABC News reported in November that cases of norovirus were on the rise nationwide between August and November.)
The Times points to the results of recent research on a particular strain of norovirus, GII.17. In late November, Nature Communications published a paper that looked into why it was experiencing a resurgence. The paper’s authors concluded that “the recent surge of GII.17 resulted from a dynamic, multifaceted process involving diverse adaptive strategies” — which could complicate an already messy situation.
Norovirus-Related Oyster Recalls Are Affecting Diners Across the Nation
This could affect more than a dozen statesOne other item in the news could have an influence on California’s reckoning with norovirus: the Santa Barbara news site Edhat reports that a cruise ship that recently had a norovirus outbreak is set to dock in the city in question later this week.
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