No change. The U.S. now averages just over 11 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day. Up 22% 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 4/16/2022, 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
Nobody is entirely sure what fraction of cases is being captured by those official counts, what with cheap and plentiful over-the-counter testing and the recent end (I think) of federally-financed free testing for the uninsured.
One way to keep tabs on that is to look at the hospitalization data. I believe that’s captured and reported completely independently of the official counts of positive tests. (Though, of course, a positive result on a hospital-adminstered test will eventually find its way into the official counts of positives). If there are a lot of new cases not captured in the official counts, the count of hospitalizations ought to rise relative to the count of new cases.
That’s not happening. My conclusion is that whatever the undercount of new cases might be, the undercount doesn’t appear to be changing rapidly.
Source: Hospitalizations calculated from the US DHHS unified hospital data set. Cases from NY times cited above.
