The U.S. now stands at 111 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day. That’s down 38% in the last seven days.
The rate of decline has been in that neighborhood for the past three or four days now, and this may well as fast as the decline gets.
Now the big question becomes “where will it stop”? At what level will Omicron continue to circulate in the population as “endemic COVID-19”?
The good news is that of the ten states that peaked earliest in the U.S. Omicron wave, five are now below 50 new cases / 100K / day. Better yet, all of the states that peaked early continue to show a steady week-to-week percentage decline in new cases. Those states are now 3.5 weeks after peak (on average), and there has been no hint of a slowdown in the rate of decline. The longer that goes on, the better off we’ll be when we reach a state of “endemic COVID-19”.
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 2/4/2022, 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
Looking ahead, the U.S. data offer no clue as to what the long-run endemic level of COVID-19 is going to be. All I can say is, so far, so good.
If I isolate the ten states that peaked earliest under Omicron (median date of peak, January 10th), mostly what shows up is a continued steady rate of decline. Like so:
That’s an average of 3.5 weeks post-peak, and there’s no sign of these slowing down. The median rate of decline for those states, over the past week, was 43 percent.
Half of those states (NY-NJ-CT, DC-MD) are already below 50 new COVID-19 cases per 100K per day. Another four weeks at that rate of decline, and all of them will be in the single digits for daily new cases.
I guess I should point out that this experience has not been matched internationally. Both South Africa and Great Britain (ignoring an apparent data reporting anomaly) appear to be having a long residual “tail” of high case counts. At some point, their period of rapid decline transitioned into one of slow or no decline in daily new cases.
Source: Johns Hopkins University, via Google search
Neither Canada nor Australia seems to have plateaued, but both of them also hit an inflection point after a couple of weeks of rapidly declining cases. Their new case curves visibly flattened out.
The U.S. curve — with no inflection point yet — no slowing of the decline some weeks after the peak — seems to be unique, at least among the countries I’ve been looking at. Maybe this time we’ll get lucky and it’ll stay that way for a while yet.
