Post #1491: COVID-19 trend, now 15/day, still rising about 25% per week

Posted on April 26, 2022

 

I’m not sure that anybody still cares about this, but the U.S. now has just under 15 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, and that count continues to rise at about 25 percent per week.

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 4/26/2022, 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

Weirdly enough, with reported new cases rising steadily, new hospitalizations are now flat-to-falling, with the most recent count of new COVID-19 hospitalizations actually slightly lower than it was a week ago.  Near as I can tell, that’s not an artifact of lower hospital participation in the US DHHS reporting system.  That’s literally fewer reported admissions with COVID, from roughly the same set of 6000+ US hospitals reporting.

Thus reinforcing the notion that it’s hard to know what, exactly, the numbers mean these days.