Today there was a further slowing in the rate of decline in new COVID-19 cases. The U.S. stands at 23 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, down 35% over the past seven days. That’s down from the low 40 percents a week ago.
We’re still seeing about 6000 new hospital admissions and 1500 deaths a 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 2/25/2022, 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
A quick international comparison of changes in cases and hospitalizations.
I’m not sure I can make anything out of this or not. The only hard conclusion is that the U.S. has seen a much larger reduction in reported new cases than the other three countries studied. This, despite earlier peaks in some of the others.
So the U.S. experience really does seem to be somewhat exceptional.
For the hospitalizations data, these aren’t counts of newly-hospitalized persons, but are instead the count of all persons who are in the hospital with COVID at any given time. Because people spend weeks in the hospital, this figure always expands following the peak of cases, in much the same way that the peak of deaths follows some weeks behind the peak of new cases.
That said, the number of persons in the hospital with COVID-19 does appear to be moving more slowly in the U.S., relative to the other countries. I can’t really even guess whether that’s due to our case reporting, the timing of our peak, or some peculiarity of the U.S. hospital system.
I think the only firm conclusion here is that cases really have fallen faster and farther than in the comparison countries.
