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.
