The U.S. new COVID-19 case rate declined over the past couple of days, and now stands at 32 new cases / 100K population per day. That’s up just 7 percent over the past 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 5/25/2022, 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
At this point, if the Northeast region isn’t peaking, it’s at least doing a fair imitation of it. A lot of those state curves seem to have decided to flatten out and bend the other way, all at the same time.
Assuming that is a peak for the Northeast region, if this wave follows the patterns set by other waves, then the peak for the U.S. as a whole should be no more than three weeks away. Thats the time difference between the start of the wave in the Northeast, and the start in the U.S. as a whole.
But it wouldn’t surprise me if the U.S. peak occurred before that. Among other things, we really should have seasonality in our favor now. Below is my best attempt at extracting the seasonal variation in COVID-19 rates from the past two years of data.
Meanwhile, BA.2.12.1 (Omicron II) is officially the dominant strain in the U.S. as a whole, and in most (but not all) of the regions within the U.S. The point being that there shouldn’t be that much more than this new variant can do, that it hasn’t already done.
Source: CDC COVID data tracker, accessed 5/25/2022.
Deaths remain below 300 a day, and hospital admissions just topped 3500 per day. The hospitalization number in particular is non-trivial — that still amounts to maybe 4 percent of U.S. daily hospital admissions. That means that COVID remains one of the leading individual causes of hospitalization in the U.S. But that’s vastly below the roughly 21,000-per-day hospitalization rate at the peak of the Omicron (I) wave.
