The U.S. now stands at 45.8 new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 per day, down slightly from yesterday. The seven-day change was -10%, not materially different from yesterday.
Only one state (Tennessee) is above 100 new cases per 100,000 per day.
In the last seven days, new cases rose in about a third of states, and fell in the remaining two-thirds.
Looks like the Delta wave has peaked for the U.S. as a whole.
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 9/10/2021, 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.
Visually, in the context of all states, for the entire pandemic, it’s starting to look like a peak. That’s a consequence of having declining new cases in the great majority of states over the past week.
Just to keep things sober, superimpose the first and second years of the pandemic, and try to sketch out a plausible rate of decline in new cases for the remainder of the Delta wave.
If the rest of the Delta wave merely plays out like clockwork, I think the reasonable conclusion is that case counts are probably not going to get close to zero before the winter wave sets in. Instead, if the timing of this year’s winter wave matches last year’s, case counts should start rising again sometime in October.
Let me emphasize that the projection above is just dumb curve-following, plus an assumption that a winter wave is a repeating feature of the coronavirus pandemic. But as of today, that’s my best prediction for the intermediate term.
