The U.S. still stands at 9 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, roughly unchanged over the past seven days. That’s not due to a uniformly unchanging situation across the country, but to offsetting effects. Rapid new-case increases in the Northeast are being offset by equally rapid continuing declines in the Mountain and Pacific regions.
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 3/30/2022, 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
In particular, while new case rates remain low, over the past week, daily new COVID-19 cases increased by roughly:
- One-quarter in Connecticut.
- One-third in Massachusetts
- One-half in New York.
To me, the geographic proximity suggests that’s not just some random blip, but probably represents a real (i.e., sustained) uptick in new case rates. So far, there’s really nothing to suggest where that’s going to end up.
The only other thing that I note is that we’re now seeing an odd and novel disconnect between the new case counts, and new COVID-19 hospitalizations. Historically, those two series were in sync with one another to within a day or two. But now? Daily new cases have been at more-or-less the same level for close to two weeks, but daily new COVID-19 hospitalizations continue to fall.
Source: CDC COVID data tracker
My only guess as to what’s causing this is the shifting mix of cases across the states. Plausibly, the propensity to hospitalize and/or the demographics of new cases differs across the states, and the shift of new cases toward the Northeast (and away from the Pacific region) might affect the rate of new hospitalizations per new case.
