Post #983: A boring update on recent COVID trends.

Posted on January 28, 2021

Sometimes, boring is good.  Don’t know about you, but I could settle for some boring right about now.

All data for this post are from the NY Times Github COVID data repository, data reported through 1/27/2021.

US rate of new cases / 100,000/day is back to pre-Thanksgiving levels.  Things aren’t quite as uniform across states as they were a few days ago, but most continue to show a downward trend.

The little hitch in the downward leg above appears to be mainly due to a data reporting issue with Rhode Island.  You won’t see that in (e.g.) newspaper-published graphs, because somehow they have access to smoother data for RI than I have.  We all get to the same end point, regardless of data source.

Below, here’s all the states on one chart, starting 1/1/2021.  In natural units, then in logs.  I add the logs so you can see that there’s a fairly uniform rate of decline across all the states (all the lines have nearly the same slope, top of the chart to bottom of the chart.)

And now state data, by six broad regions, starting 10/1/2020.  The only thing that really stands out is that both Arizona and Utah appear to have plateaued at relatively high rates of new cases/ 100,000/ day.