The U.S. now stands at just under 10 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, down 20% over the past seven days. Thirty states now have new-case rates in the single digits.
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 3/16/2022, 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
I am showing only the graph in logs (above), not the graph in actual case counts (“natural units”). The graph in natural units really doesn’t show much any more. The tail end of the curve looks like a flat line, as the current single-digits case rate is dwarfed by rates that appeared at the peak of the Omicron wave.
We’re clearly getting closer to the bottom of the Omicron wave. We’ve gone from rates of decline of 40 percent per week, to 30 percent per week, to the current 20 percent per week. That’s easiest to see in the graph of the entire pandemic, below. At this point, that bundle of lines representing the 50 states is clearly starting to curve.
The question of the moment
The question of the moment is whether our new-case rates will stabilize at some low rate, or whether they’ll start to rise again. That rise has occurred most notably in the U.K., but also to a lesser degree in other first-world countries.
Data source: Google search. I believe the underlying data are via Johns Hopkins.
As noted above, the U.K. is now seeing about 150 new cases per 100,000 population per day. That rate puts it squarely back into the middle of its initial Omicron wave. While they are having almost no deaths, their hospitalizations for COVID are rising more-or-less in line with new cases. This is once again filling U.K. hospitals with people with a COVID-19 infection. (Although, duly noted, some portion of those patients have only an “incidental” infection. That is, they are being treated for something else and just happen to have COVID.)
An article just published in the Telegraph gives a particularly in-depth discussion of what might be causing this latest wave of cases in the U.K. They list, in order:
- Waning immunity
- Changing behavior (e.g., more travel).
- Less attention paid to COVID (and more to the war in Ukraine).
- New variants, including but not limited to son-of-Omicron (BA.2).
I guess I should point out that the U.K. has a higher vaccination rate than the U.S., and that every factor listed above applies to the U.S.
We are perhaps three weeks behind the U.K. in terms of the spread of son-of-Omicron (BA.2), the more-infectious variant of Omicron. That variant became the dominant strain in the U.K. as of 2/20/2022 (citation of source given in Post #1452), whereas that should happen in the U.S. this week, if growth trends continue (see yesterday’s post for details).
Plausibly, the U.S. has a higher mask use rate. For sure, a Federal mask mandate remains in place for public transport (although the usual suspects are hard at work trying to get that axed).
In my area, I still see the overwhelming majority of people in stores wearing masks. But mask use seems almost non-existent in other public situations.
In particular, I attended a town meeting last night where perhaps one-in-ten work masks. Tellingly, those who wore masks were all wearing good ones, and were all wearing them correctly. At our current new-case rate of 10 / 100K / day in Fairfax County, VA, it seemed to me that an hours-long meeting in a stuffy room that was filled to capacity was not the place to decide not to wear a mask.
Then again, I was probably the only person in the room to calculate the odds ahead of time (Post #1438). Best guess, there was a 4 percent chance that somebody in that room was infectious. Given that meeting attendance would result in hours of exposure, I thought wearing a mask was prudent. (It would have been more prudent still to skip the meeting, but my wife and I were trying to show support for the neighbors who had asked for this meeting. Luckily, they ran out of seats, so we left to make room for those who actually had a dog in this particular fight.)
The upshot is that everything that was said about the U.K. is true or will soon be true, to some extent, about the U.S. That by no means guarantees that we’ll follow the path that the U.K. is following. But it does suggest that it’s still worth following this in the U.S. for another week or two, until we see whether or not we settle at some low “endemic” rate, or whether we’ll be going through yet another wave of COVID-19 infections as is happening now in the U.K.
