Growth in daily new cases continues to slow, but only a bit. As of Monday’s data (reported today), the U.S. stood at just over 240 new COVID-19 cases /100K population / day.
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 1/8/2022, 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.
That’s a rate of just under 800,000 new COVID-19 cases per day. I’m saying that because the “raw” count — literally what was reported today — is something like 1.4 million cases. For many states, the Monday figure covers the last three days’ worth of cases. The only reason to cite the 1.4M figure is for shock value.
The rate of daily new cases is up 65% in the past seven days. For reference, that same figure was 77% as of last Friday’s data. A little over a week back, it was more than 100%. So growth is slowing. But only a bit at a time.
In terms of bright spots, DC appears to have passed its peak, at a rate of about 350 new cases / 100K / day. New York and New Jersey appear to be close to a peak in daily new cases. For what it’s worth, I date the start of the wave (the sharp upward inflection point in the curve) to 12/13/2021. Which means that, if they have peaked, that’s just about four weeks from takeoff to peak rate.
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For what it’s worth, that’s maybe a week longer than it took either Canada or Great Britain to reach their peaks (see below). Assuming they have reached their peaks. So, three-to-four-week-ish is looking like a “normal” amount of time for the upslope portion of the Omicron wave.
Source: Google the country name and COVID, on a computer, and those graphs appear.
(That’s a bit of cherry-picking, though. Note that I didn’t mention Denmark or Norway. That’s because neither of those two now appears to have hit a peak. Forgive me for injecting a bit of optimism into the discussion.)
There are several artifacts of data reporting showing up today. On paper, Rhode Island has an absurdly high new case rate, but that’s because they reported their “catch-up” data late last week. Their seven-day moving average has about 10 day’s worth of new cases in it. Separately, a lot of states in the middle part of the country show a little downward hook to their rates today. I have to believe that’s also some sort of an artifact of data reporting that was disturbed over the holidays and is now passing outside of the seven-day moving average.
I’ll take a look at the hospitalization data in a post later today.
