The U.S. remains at roughly 10 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, up 10 percent in the past seven days. In the Northeast region, new cases are rising almost 40 percent per week. In the South Atlantic, they are still falling at an average rate of 25 percent per week.
This week, the count of daily new hospitalizations began to rise slightly. It had been falling since the peak of the Omicron wave. This is useful, because it validates that the slight uptick in new case counts is probably real, and not some artifact of data reporting.
Meanwhile, as if the quality of the data weren’t bad enough already — what with home testing displacing officially-tabulated testing, and with the end of “free” (that is, federal-taxpayer-paid) testing in the U.S. — that quality of the official new-case counts continues to deteriorate. Eleven states now report case counts just once or twice a week. The resulting “jump” in the new case count occurring with the weekly reporting make it hard to tell real changes from mere reporting errors. The lags in reporting also mean that the reported data will respond even more sluggishly to any true changes in trend.
What with everybody having decided that this is over, the cumulative increases kind of creep up on you. With this latest round of reporting, Washington DC is now over 40 new cases per 100K per day. A cluster of Northeast states is in the high-20s to low-30s.
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 4/12/2022, 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
Source: CDC COVID data tracker
