Now 25 new cases per 100K population per day, up 30% in the past week. A week ago, it was 19.
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 5/10/2022, 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 was going to attribute the increased growth rate to Pennsylvania, a large state that did some catch-up reporting yesterday. But the graph says otherwise. Things ticked up pretty much across the country.
I don’t want to make too much of a one-day increase, but this is interesting in that it seems to be nation-wide, or nearly. And yet, it’s bad science to make up plausible explanations for it after-the-fact, if it turns out to signal an inflection point on the curve. So maybe it’s better to speculate on possible causes ahead of time.
Given the lags involved (between infection, symptoms, care-seeking, testing, lab turnaround, reporting, and then a seven-day moving average), today’s reported uptick, if real and not just a data-reporting issue, is a consequence of an increase in infection events that occurred around the very end of April.
As far as I can tell, that correlates with absolutely nothing. It’s too late for Spring Break and associated religious holidays, for 2022.
The only rational explanation is that we somehow angered Hygeia on or about 4/30/2022. (Or one of the myriad health deities. Seems to be a fair bit of competition for the god/goddess of health gig.)
In short, there appears to be no rhyme or reason to this particular uptick. At least none that I can see. Perhaps it’ll disappear tomorrow.
That said, a comparison against the last two years shows what an impious lot we have become. A year ago, an upturn like this would have evoked at lot of prayerful pleas, I think. Now, we’re like, don’t cancel the barbecue on account of a little thing like that.
