Now 18.5 new cases per 100K population, up 26 percent in the last 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 5/4/2022, 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 CDC updated it’s estimates of incidence of COVID-19 variants yesterday. The most recent reading is that the latest one — BA.2.12.1 — accounted for around 37% of new cases, as of the week ending 4/30/2022. That’s up from about 26% last week, so that fraction is now growing at slightly less than 50% per week.
Source: CDC COVID data tracker, accessed 5/4/2022
That’s far slower than the rate at which Omicron took over from Delta. That’s probably due to a) more immunity in the population, following the Omicron wave, and b) only modestly higher infectiousness of BA.2.12.1 compared to Omicron (BA.2).
That said, as these new-case rates rise week after week, eventually states are returning to levels that we had hoped we’d left behind us. As of today, rounding the estimates up just a bit (because the trend is up, and there’s no indication that will change any time soon),
- Vermont is pushing 60 new cases / 100K.
- Rhode Island, Maine are at or above 50 / 100K.
- New York, Massachusetts, and Washington are around 40 / 100K.
That said, hospitalizations continue to rise less rapidly than new cases, with hospital admissions for (with) COVID up just 15% in the past seven days. Deaths have not yet started to rise.
