The official count is still at 26 new cases per 100K population per day, an increase of 28% over the past seven days. Rounded to the nearest whole number. Same as yesterday.
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 5/13/2022, 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 guess there are only a few things left to say.
First, nobody really knows what the actual new case count is. That’s been true all along — at best, half of cases were captured by the official reporting — but there’s a nagging suspicion that the gap between the true and official case counts has been rising. Can’t prove it, but between cheap and plentiful home testing, and a large degree of immunity in the population (suggesting that severe cases would become an increasingly small portion of all cases), it’s a good bet that it is. For sure, the last fix we got — via the CDC seroprevalence survey — suggested that the ratio of total infections to official infections was expanding. It used to be a bit above 1:1, but as of the February 2022, cumulative for the entire pandemic, that had risen to 1.4:1. Because that’s cumulative for the entire pandemic, that suggests a pretty large shift in the most recent months, in order to move the entire average up that much.
Source: Post #1498, calculated from CDC seroprevalence survey data, COVID data tracker accessed 5/2/2022.
That said, deaths are still not rising — they are still around 300/day — and hospitalizations still have not reached 3000 per day. So there’s a lot of new cases, but not a lot of severe new cases. As discussed in earlier posts, I’m pretty sure that’s a consequence of the change in the vaccinated/unvaccinated mix of new cases. The vaccine and (particularly) booster still provide good protection against severe illness, even if they provide little protection against getting some COVID-19 infection after a few months.
Finally, this seems like it’s just getting started and/or there seems to be no hint that this is slowing down. Note that the regions that started this the earliest (e.g., the Northeast, top line above) have had cases rising at a more-or-less steady rate since the end of March. (That graphs as a straight line on the log chart at the top of this post). Meanwhile, other regions — most of the middle of the country — are only now joining this wave. Both of those suggest this has a lot longer to run.
Around here, informally at least, I think I’m seeing a turnaround in mask use, as Fairfax County, VA tops 40 new cases per 100K in the official stats. Today, mask use was nearly uniform at both stores I briefly visited. My wife perceives an age gap, as almost all older people are masked, and few younger people are. That makes perfect sense from an every-man-for-himself personal protection standpoint. Which is, I think, all we’re going to have in the U.S. moving forward.
