Now 19.4 new cases per 100K per day, still rising 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 5/5/2022, 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
Some observations:
Seasonality? At this point, new cases are above what we would expect to see based on the time of year and the case rates from the prior two years. That’s true if you are looking at either the actual day-by-day counts, or a “seasonal” fit that smooths out the data and tries to extract a single seasonal winter peak and summer lull:
Geography? This latest wave (which I guess I’ll have to label as the BA.2.12.1 wave) remains highly geographically concentrated.
If I divide the country in two, simply based on the middle of the current range of new case rates, the states that area above the middle look like this, below. That’s New England/Mid Atlantic, plus Illinois, Washington (and Hawaii).
If I take the same data and divide the range into five equal pieces, the entire middle of the country (except Colorado) is in the lowest-valued (fewest-new-cases) piece:
So, by land area, this new COVID-19 wave has not really affected most of the country. Yet.
At any rate, cases are rising at more-or-less 25 percent per week. This latest wave has broken out of any seasonal pattern that existed prior to this, since we ought to be heading into our summer minimum, but we’re not. And we’re still not at the point where the new variant — BA.2.12.1– accounts for the majority of cases. We’re still mostly in the tail-end of the Omicron wave.
Hospitalizations now appear to be picking up, with the most recent CDC data showing 2200 new COVID-19 hospital admissions, up 20% in the past seven days.
Except for the curve for deaths — which is flat, at present, based on the CDC COVID data tracker — this is starting to look like any other COVID-19 wave.
As with prior waves, hygiene lags new cases. Mask use continues to fall, and I’d bet that will go on until this latest wave is well under way.
Que sera sera.
