The U.S. still stands at just over 9 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day. There has been no net change in the past seven days.
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 3/25/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.” The NY Times U.S. tracking page 3may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
Looking around the world a bit:
Canada seems to have hit its near-term low on 3/18/2022, just a few days before the U.S. And that little uptick doesn’t look like much, but their new cases are up 25% in the seven days following their low. Currently their new case rate is just slightly higher than that of the U.S.
Source: Johns Hopkins data via Google search.
The U.K. is still seeing no respite from rising cases. Coincidence or not, their new case count has risen at an average rate of 28% per week since they hit their minimum on 2/25/2022. The new-case rate in the U.K. is maybe 20 times what it is in the U.S. right now.
Australia hit its minimum new case rate on or about 2/18/2022, followed by a broad, shallow bottom. If I just cherry-pick the past week in isolation, cases were rising at the rate of about 30% per week.
One week ago, I plotted up what I called the Omicron-rebound nations and the Omicron non-rebound nations. Might be a good time to update those two charts, using the same sets of countries.
But all that seems to show is that a trend is a trend until it ceases to be a trend. With one exception (Germany, whose numbers appear quite erratic), those that were showing a rebound last week continue to do so. Those that were showing no rebound continued to do so. Like so:
Source: Our World in Data, underlying data are from Johns Hopkins.
The only thing I glean from this is that all the ones that continued to fall, continued to fall. In other words, in this odd sample-of-convenience, I don’t see anybody who bottomed out, and then just stayed there or resumed a fall.
All things considered:
- Given how closely the U.S. and Canadian series have parelled each other so far,
- and these examples of fairly sharp rebound in CA, U.K., AUS,
- and the total lack of examples of countries reaching a flat bottom to the curve and not rebounding,
- and chuck in the continued growth of son-of-Omicron (BA.2) in the U.S., then
I guess I’d expect to see U.S. case start to rise at this point. We might have a broad, shallow bottom to our curve, like Australia. Or a short, sharp turnaround like Canada or the U.K.
But when you look around at what’s happening elsewhere, under conditions similar to ours, it’s hard to make the argument that our new case counts are going to stay down. Near as I can tell, the current rule is that every country that hits a bottom sees a rebound.
