Currently, the U.S. as a whole is seeing 31 new COVID-19 cases / 100K / day.
Daily new COVID-19 cases for the The U.S. are now 40% lower than at the 9/1/2021 peak of the Delta wave.
That 40% decline since 9/1/2021 is made up of:
- Three regions (South Atlantic, South Central, Pacific) where daily new cases are down by about half.
- Three regions (Northeast, Midwest, Mountain) where daily new cases are roughly unchanged.
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 10/7/2021, 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.
Final update on the Virginia school reopening analysis
Because this is a post about nothing much new happening, I thought I’d update my analysis of the impact of K-12 opening in Virginia. Fears about school reopening seem to have faded — in Virginia, at least — so it’s a pretty good bet that a) once again, I’ll see nothing and b) there’s no practical point to continuing this.
Recall that I’m using the staggered opening dates of K-12 schools across Virginia as a “natural experiment”. If school reopening generates a lot of new cases, we ought to see the share of new cases attributable to the school-aged population rise.
But that’s not happening. Maybe there’s a little upward drift. Maybe not. But it bears no relationship to when K-12 schools opened.
Source: Analysis of data from Virginia Department of Health, and school calendars from Virginia Department of Education. This embodies a crosswalk of school district to Virginia health district.
