Officially, the U.S. now has 30 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day. That’s down 7 percent over the past seven days.
That’s up a bit from yesterday’s figure of 29, due to some catch-up post-holiday reporting in California and a few other states.
That said, it still appears that the official count of daily new COVID-19 cases has peaked, for now.
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 6/2/2022, 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
No clue what the real count is.
It sure would be helpful if we could get some better estimate of the actual number of new cases in circulation. I bring this up because I’ve heard reports of new infections from two different people in my small circle of acquaintances. So I’m back to wondering just how thick on the ground actual new infections are, compared to the official statistics.
The cluster-y nature of new infections makes it hard to based any estimate on your own personal observations. Not only are there relatively few new infections, but they tend to come in large, related batches. In that sort of situation, you can easily see an infrequent “spike” within any small population. I can’t really conclude much from the two sets of cases I heard about recently.
There’s no doubt that official count is far lower than the true count of new cases. That’s been true throughout the pandemic. The number of cases captured via the official test data has always been a substantial underestimate of total cases. As of a few months ago, the official count was about half of what the CDC estimated from the presence of antibodies in blood samples (“seroprevalence”).
There’s a couple of factors suggesting that the degree of underestimate should have grown in recent months. The first is the widespread availability of over-the-counter COVID-19 tests. The second is the reduced severity of the average new case, as an ever-increasing fraction of cases are occurring in individuals with some pre-existing immunity (either re-infections or breakthrough cases in the vaccinated). Together, those mean that a) more people can figure out their COVID-19 status on their own, and b) a small fraction of new cases require medical intervention and the associated official test results.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have some estimate of what that actual new-case rate is doing?
Falling average case severity means that we can no longer rely on either deaths or hospitalizations as a good measure of new case prevalence. The rising fraction of cases that are re-infections and breakthrough infections means that the death and hospitalization case rates (deaths per new infection, hospitalizations per new infection) ought to be falling.
The CDC’s most recent seroprevalence estimate is still from February 2022. That’s now four months old, and so predates the entire Omicron-II wave. I should point out that that’s far later than in the past. Looking back in my records, I see a snapshot of the October 2021 survey dated early December 2021, and the January 2022 survey dated March 1, 2022. So, historically, CDC was able to get that information out about a month after they got the blood samples. I have no idea why that’s now a month late. But the bottom line is that we have no new information from that source. And if that eventually shows up, it’ll tell us what things looked like back in March 2022.
I looked again at Tompkins County, NY — the only jurisdiction I found that tracked self-reported positives from home tests. They stopped collecting that information months ago.
To sum it up: Zilch. Nothing. There appears to be no data source from which to guess what the actual new-case rate is in my area, or even for the U.S. population as a whole.
