I apologize for having nothing new to try to scare you with today. The plain fact of the matter is that today looks pretty much like yesterday. So if your anxiety level was already low, you’re just going to have to suffer through another day of that.
If I had one thing to say, it’s that the orderly and uniform picture that held for the last month or so is now breaking up.
In the Northeast, new COVID-19 case rates are rising (slightly) in the majority states, starting with NY-NJ-CT-RI. By contrast, on the West Coast, new COVID-19 cases rates continue to fall unabated in California, and are stable elsewhere.
And so, the bundle of lines above is beginning to fray at the end, as the new case rates diverge across the regions.
Like New York, California has its own COVID-19 variant that is reputedly more infectious than the current variety. But it’s just hard to get all worked up about that, because if the California variant is more transmissible, that’s surely not showing up in the new cases data.
That’s even clearer when plotted on a log scale, so that a constant rate of change shows up as a straight line. California remains on its own glide path.
On balance, the majority of states are showing day-to-day declines in new cases.
