The U.S. now stands at just under 13 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, up 30% in the past seven days. Cases are rising in all regions except the Mountain states.
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 4/20/2022, 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
New COVID-19 hospitalizations are rising, but only about 5 percent per week:
Source: Calculated from CDC COVID data tracker, accessed 4/20/2022
Based on the hospitalization number, we remain well into the territory where COVID-19 poses less risk of hospitalization and death, to a vaccinated and boostered individual, than does typical seasonal flu. Best guess, hospitalizations would have to be somewhere around 8400/day (Post #1430) before the risk to that population from COVID-19 would match the risk from typical seasonal flu.
Mask use is now clearly at the lowest rate since Carnegie-Mellon began tracking it early in the pandemic. In particular, its lower than it was at last summer’s mid-year lull, when national new case counts were in the low single digits. FWIW, I find myself increasingly in the minority by wearing a mask in indoor public spaces.
Source: Carnegie-Mellon University COVIDcast.
Finally, the College of William and Mary saw a significant uptick in cases that is not mirrored by the age 18-24 population of Virginia in general. (I track this because my daughter attends that college.)
Sources: Calculated from the W&M COVID-19 dashboard and Virginia Department of Health data on new cases by age.
It’s not clear that this does or doesn’t have anything to do with the cessation of all remaining mask rules there starting 3/30/2022. If that were to have an effect, it should have shown up a week or so earlier. And, in fact, W&M relaxed the mask rules a month before that, only requiring them in (I believe) classrooms at that point. So while this looks like cause-and-effect (mask requirements stop, cases rise), I’m not sure I’d jump to that conclusion.
FWIW, it looks like UVA is showing a bit of an uptick now (reference), James Madison isn’t really showing anything (reference), Virgina Tech isn’t (reference), and for VCU, it’s hard to say, but maybe they are (reference). My point is, this doesn’t look like some generic springtime-on-campus phenomenon.
The interesting question for W&M is what will happen in the four weeks remaining between now and graduation.
