U.S. new COVID-19 cases continue to rise just over 20% per week. We now stand at an average of 18 new cases per 100K population per day. That doesn’t seem like much, but the official case counts are now twice what they were four weeks ago.
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 5/3/2022, 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
The most interesting piece of information I’m seeing right now is COVID-19 deaths. They aren’t rising.
Source: CDC COVID data tracker, accessed 5/3/2022
Followed by hospitalizations. They aren’t rising as fast as new cases, and length of stay is falling. As of today, it looks like the average length of stay for COVID-19 cases is just 5.6 days (calculated by dividing total cases in the hospital at any one time, by new hospitalizations per day.)
Historically, hospitalizations would rise just a day or two after new cases started to rise. And that has sort-of happened. And deaths would begin to rise about two weeks later. And that’s not happening at all.
Both of which suggest that, for whatever reason, average severity of reported cases is falling. This, despite the likelihood that we’re missing an increasing share of cases, probably those at the low end of the severity spectrum.
Tough to say why, exactly, we’re seeing an apparent reduction in case severity at this point. Maybe it’s vaccination and boosters. Maybe we’re finally reaching the point where all the risk-taking unvaccinated people have already been infected or worse from COVID-19. Maybe this is an artifact of the shift in the location of cases across states (which have radically different case hospitalization rates). Maybe this is a result of the shift in the demographics of who is being infected.
All I can say is that, for now, while reported cases are doubling every four weeks or so, nothing much is yet happening to hospitalizations and deaths. Hospitalizations are up, some. Deaths are not.
