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 5/13/2021, 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.
What do Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Washington, DC have in common? Aside from being geographically clustered, all of those states saw new COVID-19 cases per day fall by more than 30 percent in the past week.
In fact, the rate in New Jersey fell by 60% in the past seven days. That’s helped along by a little data reporting issue, but even without that, it’s an impressive rate of decline.
We’re back to a situation where most states see a day-to-day decline in the new case count.
For the past seven days, there were only three states where the new case rate didn’t fall, and in each case, that’s purely an artifact of their data reporting. (MS, NV, WY don’t report new cases on Saturday or Sunday, so their seven-day moving average goes up-and-down over the course of a week. Wednesday is on the up portion of the cycle.)
Finally, per the map above, almost all states in the U.S. East Coast and Midwest regions saw more than a 20% decline in new cases over the past seven days.
