The U.S. stands at 50.7 new cases per 100,000 population per day. That’s down a bit from yesterday (50.9) and the day before yesterday (51.3).
Accordingly, we had a little peak in the curve on September 1. We’ll only know in hindsight if that holds up as the peak of the Delta wave.
We won’t know anything one way or the other until the middle-to-end of next week. That’s due to the lack of data reporting over the weekend, coupled with this weekend being the Labor Day holiday.
If you’ve been following along, a peak in U.S. cases is not unexpected. Below, the actual data are in red, the projection is the faint blue line. But if that’s the peak, it’s an unusually sharp one.
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 9/4/2021, 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.
And you can see that, as with prior waves, we’re still going to cycle through a series of individual state peaks. The first one was FL-LA-MA. Looks like the top of the next little peak will be formed by SC and TN.
In any case, we’ll know more sometime around the middle of next week.
As of this past week, daily new cases were still rising in 43 out of 50 states. By eye, that includes all of the Midwest (except Missouri, where this wave started), all of the Mountain states, and all of the South Atlantic states (except Florida, which has already peaked).
While the current cases are mostly in the South, that the center of case growth has shifted north. In particular, that cluster of states ID-WY-SD-ND catches my eye, because those were the leaders of last year’s winter wave.
Map courtesy of Datawrapper.de.
Not much else to say. The three leaders of the Delta wave (FL-LA-MS) have all peaked. There are now just two states over 100 new cases / 100K / day (TN, SC). Cases continue to rise in the great majority of states. But, possibly, the overall U.S. total may have peaked. We'll only know in hindsight, and we won't have any reliable information until, at best, the middle of next week.
