Post #1536: COVID-19 to 6/14/2022, no change, BA.4+BA.5 now >20% of new cases

Posted on June 15, 2022

 

Boring is as boring does.  The U.S. remains at 32 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population.

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 6/15/2022, 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, it seems like it’s getting somewhere near past-due for this wave of COVID-19 to peak.  But so far, that’s only really evident in the Northeast.  So you have to start asking, is this the effect of yet another round of genetic variants of COVID?

Source:  CDC COVID data tracker, accessed 6-15-2022

 

Source:  CDC COVID data tracker, accessed 6-15-2022

If there is any obvious link between the current incidence of BA.4 and BA.5, by region, and new cases, by region, it’s not completely obvious.  The Northeast does appear to have the lowest proportion of those two new variants, and it has the greatest rate of decline in new cases.  But that’s about as far as that correlation goes.

So far, BA.4 and BA.5 haven’t caused any major waves in the countries where they first took hold.  It’s a bit of a stretch to think they’ll cause yet another wave of COVID here.  I’m not going to worry about it as long as the Northeast remains on a steady downward course.