The U.S. is now under 15 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, down 33% over the past seven days. We now have 11 states with new-case rates in the single digits. Even in those low-case-rate states, there’s still no indication that we’re getting close to some stable “endemic” case rate.
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 3/5/2022, 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
Too soon to start looking for COVID-free counties.
Just a little over a year ago, COVID-19 new-case rates got into the single digits, and I went looking for counties that appeared to have no active COVID-19 cases. The idea was to see if COVID-19 actually appeared to be extinguished over some fairly large area.
In part, that’s a fools errand. The new-case counts are driven by population size. Just as a matter of statistics, small counties are far more likely to show zero new cases than large ones are. Unsurprisingly, much of what showed up was tiny little rural counties.
That said, something tells me I ought to start repeating that analysis now. If for no other reason to see how this portion of the pandemic compares to May 2021.
Last time, I arbitrarily set a cutoff of a minimum of 5000 population and four weeks COVID-free. Here’s what met those criteria as of late April 2021, then what met the criteria one week later:
Last time around, I did a little statistical analysis to suggest that the persistence of that last was unlikely to be merely a statistical fluke. In other words, those appeared to be likely to be true “zero case” counties. That’s all in Post #1133, May 7 2021. They didn’t stay that way. But, for that period of time, at least some of them probably were literally COVID-free.
The U.S. case count (under 15) is just slightly higher than it was at that time (about 9). So I have now dusted off the programming and re-run it on the current county-level case counts.
To my surprise, no counties meet those criteria yet, under the Omicron wave. And the reason for that is pretty obvious, in hindsight. Sure, the current U.S. case count is about where it was in May 2021. But last year, that was a low-and-stable case rate. This year, we’re still climbing down from the peak of the Omicron wave.
Here’s the list of counties of more than 5000 population that have the longest COVID-free periods as of 3/4/2022. If there’s any pattern to that, it escapes me. I think it’s just too soon to go looking for COVID-free areas yet.
