The U.S. is now at 14 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, up 23% in the past seven days. The weekly growth has been in that neighborhood for a while now.
This second U.S. Omicron wave secondary peak of the U.S. Omicron wave started mostly in the U.S. northeast and mid-Atlantic, with New York being the epicenter. The interesting development today is that the Northeast has visibly reached an inflection point. If that’s worst that the latest Omicron variant (BA.2.12.1) can bring on, then this second Omicron wave may go on for a while yet, but it’s not likely to amount to much.
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 4/23/2022, 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
I wouldn’t normally make much of a short-term change in one region, but if you look at the individual states in that region (below), it seems as if they’ve all starting to form that left-side-of-the-hilltop shape. A pattern like that, shared by many states in the same area, suggests some common underlying cause, and not just a fluke in one or two large states.
In addition, hospitalizations continue to rise more slowly than new cases. Where new cases were up 23% in the past seven days, new COVID-19 hospitalizations were up just 9%.
The weather is in our favor, in the sense that Omicron seems to follow the same seasonal pattern as flu, and as other coronaviruses. Below, I’ve fit curves to the COVID-19 new case data for the first two years, with just enough degrees-of-freedom to allow them to pick up one low point in the year. Abstracting from the many waves caused by this-and-that over the past couple of years, we ought to expect an early-summer lull in COVID-19 activity.
Finally, if you look at (e.g.) the U.K., Australia, and Canada, somewhere around two months elapsed between the primary and secondary peaks of their Omicron waves. The U.S., being larger, might be expected to take a bit longer, even if it follows the same pattern.
I guess, all-in-all, the U.S. secondary Omicron wave is not shaping up to be a big deal, as it was in the U.K. or Australia. The new strain that was identified in New York appears to have done its worst, and there’s been no huge secondary peak there. So, maybe we’ll end up with cases and hospitalizations at 10% of the level of the Omicron peak. At that rate, the average vaccinated and boostered individual still faces more risk from typical seasonal flu than from Omicron. Even BA.2.12.1 Omicron.