Post #1152: COVID-19 trend to 5/27/2021

Posted on May 28, 2021

As we go into Memorial Day weekend, new COVID-19 case cases per day are more than two-thirds below the peak of the fourth U.S. COVID-19 wave.

New cases

THIS WEEK:

LAST WEEK

Source for this and other graphs of new case counts:  Calculated from The New York Times. (2021). Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States. Retrieved 5/28/2021, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.”  The NY Times U.S. tracking page may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html.

If we compare the situation this week (top) to last week (bottom), in addition to the generally lower rate of new COVID-19 cases, there overall rate of decline has slowed somewhat.

There appears to be an increase in cases in the Pacific region, but this is probably just a data reporting anomaly.  The increase is due to a sharp uptick in new cases in Washington State.  Based on a description of that in the NY Times as ” … a backlog of cases from unspecified days”.

Vaccination

The pace of vaccination continues to fall, but that aggregate number doesn’t tell the full story.

Source:  CDC

The pace is being kept up to some degree due to opening up vaccination to children age 12 to 16.  Growth in newly vaccinated individuals among middle-aged and elderly adults was almost nil.  We probably should not expect to see those numbers go much higher than they are now.

Source:  Calculated from CDC data.

No COVID-19-free states yet.

And so we’re reaching this odd stasis where COVID-19 new case rates are low, case rates are compressing toward some low average, but every state still has COVID-19 circulating in the population.   Nobody seems to have reached herd immunity at the state level, and everybody still has some modest level of new COVID-19 cases per day.  Seems like no state can get that rate below 3 new cases per 100,000 per day.

Few COVID-19 free counties.

To finish off this analysis, I once again looked for counties of at least 5,000 population that had zero new COVID-19 cases over the past four weeks.  Last time I did this, I found five.  This time I found twelve.  But, as before, they are all small rural counties.  There is still not a single urbanized county (or even mid-sized rural county) where COVID-19 appears to have disappeared entirely.