The U.S. now stands at 31 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population, not really very different from where we were over three weeks ago. That said, it’s about time for this latest wave to peak, and maybe this last little dip in cases is the start of that.
It’s tough to say. The indicators are mixed. When I run all the information through a blender and ponder the resulting data smoothie, I’m guessing this is the peak of the Omicron-II wave in the U.S.
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
By eye, the official count of new infections looks like it has leveled off. Based on the shape of prior waves, I’d guess it’s getting ready to fall. Further, the timing is just about right for that to happen now, based on how long it took for the Omicron-II (BA.2.12.1) wave to peak in the Northeast. Perhaps even a bit late.
On the other hand, new hospital admissions for COVID-19 continue to rise.
Source: CDC COVID data tracker.
(You will read that admissions lag cases, but that was never true in the past. Near as I could tell, once you include all the data reporting lags, historically, reported admissions changed virtually in lock-step with officially reported cases. But now, the official count of cases has been level for three weeks, but hospitalizations continue to rise.)
Could that rise in hospital admissions be the result of the slow degradation of post-booster immunity in the elderly? Or is this the result of the “true” new case count continuing to rise, while the official case count is flat? Or yet something else?
And on yet a third hand, data on self-reported symptoms reinforces the idea that the new case count is flat. The fraction of people reporting some sort of COVID-like symptoms (in a Facebook survey) remains roughly unchanged over the past few weeks, similar to the official new case counts:
Source: Carnegie-Mellon COVIDcast.
On a fourth hand, lurking on the background are the two new variants, BA.4 and BA.5. But those don’t seem to have done much in the countries where they have become the dominant strains.
On the fifth hand, there’s seasonality. We’re due for a break sometime around now. For the past couple of years, cases hit a summertime low.
On net, I’m guessing this is the actual peak in daily new cases, for now.
How long ago was that?
It’s fashionable now to blame any irregularity in the seasonality of respiratory viruses on COVID-19 hygiene measures. But thanks to constant harping on the mythical “lockdowns” (that never occurred in Virginia, for sure — see next post), people forget just how long ago any official restrictions were removed.
Virginia lifted the last of the capacity restrictions on public venues on May 28, 2021. That was, by all reports, the last of the mandatory restrictions on anything doing with COVID-19, for adults in public spaces, undertaken at the order of the Virginia government. Governor Northam then allowed the COVID-19 state-of-emergency declaration to expire on June 30 2021.
For over a year now, there have no COVID-19 restrictions on adults, mandated under Virginia law. (There remained a Federal mandate for masks on public transit, and there still remains a Federal mandate for masks in health care facilities, neither of which matters in the bigger picture. There may also have remained mandates within government buildings themselves, which again does not matter overall).
The majority of Virginia school districts had resumed in-person classes by the end of the 2020-2021 school year, and all of them had in person-classes by the start of the 2021-22 school year. The legislatively-mandated school mask mandate was removed in February 2022, effective March 1 2022.
We’re going on four months now, with no legally-mandated COVID-19 hygiene for children, either.
This doesn’t mean that COVID-19 hygiene ceased. It just means that whatever you saw for adults, over the past year, was the voluntary action of private citizens and private entities.
My real point is that whatever impact our loss of COVID-19 hygiene measures may have had, presumably that happened months to years ago. The COVID-II (BA.2.12.1) wave occurred not just in the U.S., but pretty much across the world. Assuming that’s now ending, we ought to see a return to the underlying, native seasonality of most coronaviruses. And that means a summertime lull.
