Today, the U.S. new COVID-19 case count rounds up to 31 per 100K population per day. That’s down 7 percent in the past seven days. Give all the reporting noise surrounding the Memorial Day holiday, the best way to characterize it is to say that new cases remain more-or-less flat.
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 6/3/2022, 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
Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?
Duly noted, what you see above is the official count of new cases, based on tests reported to state health departments. That has never captured all new cases at any time during the pandemic, and there’s a sense that the share of cases captured by that official count is now slipping. But only a sense, no hard numbers.
Nobody seems to have a clue what the actual count of new cases is now. Worse, nobody seems to have a plan in place for getting a clue.
Based on what I’ve read in the popular press, a lot of experts have figured out that just about the only good way to know the number of COVID-19 infections circulating in the community is to do what they do in the U.K. and test a random sample of individuals, whether they have symptoms or not. So-called surveillance testing.
And yet, getting a cross-section of the U.S. public to cooperate with — well, pretty much anything, but in particular — U.S. health care authorities is less likely than getting residents of the U.K. to cooperate similarly. In the U.K., I get the feeling that much of the population truly appreciates their National Health Service. By contrast, I’d say that the average American pretty much loathes the U.S. health care system (though not their individual providers). So we can try to go down the same road as the U.K., but I’d expect it to be a much rockier road.
That said, the CDC has been tracking flu season for decades. And they don’t do anything like that. Nor does the CDC (mostly) track flu season via test results. As it turns out, there are other ways that the CDC and private-sector organizations have provided “semi-quantitative” estimates of flu prevalence (and COVID-19 prevalence). So maybe some combination of those squishier numbers is what we’ll end up with.
I guess my next post will outline what the CDC and others currently do to track flu season. Likely, that’s all we’re going to get for tracking COVID. Worse, if the symptoms of COVID (in those with some prior immunity) are little different from those of flu, then … maybe some of the major components of both flu tracking and COVID-19 tracking are going to be rendered more-or-less useless from now on.
