The U.S. is now at 78 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day. That’s down 45 percent over the past seven days. Since late January, that number has fallen by a more-or-less steady 10 cases per day.
Cases have now fallen by more than two-thirds since the 1/16/2022 peak of the Omicron wave.
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 2/8/2022, 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
So far, there’s no strong hint that the current trend is going to end any time soon. Above, you can see the line for the Northeast looks like it’s beginning to flatten, but that’s just a consequence of getting down into lower case rates. Percentage-wise, the rate of decline is essentially unchanged, as you can see from the same graph, with a log scale. (With a log scale, a constant percentage decline graphs as a straight line.)
If I focus on the ten states that peaked earliest, I still so no obvious inflection point in the ensemble of lines. There’s no “valley” starting to form yet.
Finally, the actual data continue to track the simple constant-decline extrapolation that I drew in last week. Here you can see that the actual path since that time (blue) continues to overlap the projected path (orange).
Closer to home, Virginia data show no uptick in COVID outbreaks in schools under Omicron. That’s a pretty good trick, considering how much more transmissible Omicron is compared to the Delta variant that was prevalent at the end of last semester.
Source: Virginia Department of Health. Original graph was extensively altered to remove other data series and to highlight key elements.
That said, the count of outbreaks is a crude measure and is not a measure of the number of cases of COVID among Virginia schoolchildren. (An “outbreak” is three or more cases where there’s strong evidence that the cases are related and that they all acquired their infections at the same time and place.)
If I turn to the largest school district in Virginia (Fairfax County Public Schools), by eye, the count of known cases among FCPS school children has merely kept pace with the count of all cases in surrounding Fairfax Count.
Source: Calculated from Virginia Department of Health data.
Source for school data: FCPS
The Fairfax County new case rate is just about three times what it was compared to the Fall 2021 baseline. And the same is true of the count of cases known to FCPS.
Given the numerous ongoing lawsuits in Virgina, up to and including suits at the Supreme Court of Virginia, I feel obliged to say that this has occurred with a school mask mandate in place.
I also feel obliged to say that the Omicron wave will be over long before our courts get around to deciding these various lawsuits. But hey, more work for lawyers is good, right?
So the good news is that the schools appear to be doing just fine, regardless of our state government and our litigious citizenry. The far greater infectiousness of Omicron has not translated into any material spread in the schools beyond the general spread in the community.
I’ve now read several newspaper comments all saying what said about a month ago. Between the self-inflicted chaos of Virginia Executive Order 2 (Post #1403, Post #1404), and (e.g.) smearing a high school kid for tweeting an unfavorable news report, a lot of Virginia voters were fooled into thinking they were getting another Governor Hogan, but they actually got another Governor DeSantis instead. We’re now Florida, but without the sense of humor.
