Roughly one week after the peak of the U.S. Omicron wave, daily new cases are down just 10 percent. That’s slower than most other countries, as shown in yesterday’s post.
Data 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 1/22/2022, 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.
I think we can chalk that up to the lack of coordination across the states, and not to anything particularly unusual about Omicron in the U.S. Much of the U.S. East Coast has peaked, and rates are falling. Much of the rest of the country has not, and rates there continue to rise. The net, for now, is a slow decline in the national rate.
If I take only the states that appear to have peaked, and have at least seven days of post-peak experience, the median rate of decline is 35% per week. That median rate of decline for individual states is larger than the rates of decline seen internationally (yesterday’s post).
Compare to:
The upshot is that within the typical state where Omicron is receding, the rate of decline is at least as fast as we have seen for foreign nations that have peaked. But in the aggregate, for the U.S. as a whole, it looks like we’re going to recede from our peak at a slower rate, owing to large sections of the country where Omicron has not yet peaked.
