The U.S. is still seeing an average of 31 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, same as it was more than three weeks ago. But what was an offsetting jumble of increases and decreases across the regions, three weeks back, now seems to be getting organized into a coherent downslope for the U.S. Omicron-II (BA.2.12.1) wave.
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 6/18/2022, 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
You can arrive at this conclusion by looking at the circled portion of the graph and noting that the lines for the regions are once again forming a nice, compact bundle. They are no longer pointing in different directions. You can see that by scanning down the column of numbers showing the percent change over the last seven days. Numbers range from modestly negative to slightly positive.
So that’s my call for now. I think this is the peak, and now we’ll head into our summertime lull in new COVID-19 cases.
Hospitalizations?
The only contrary indicator at this time is COVID-19 hospitalizations. Those are continuing to rise, despite every indication that new cases are flat-to-falling.
Source for this and following graphs: CDC COVID data tracker, accessed 6-18-2022
There’s an odd regionality to this new disconnect between cases and hospitalizations. Of the five largest U.S. states, this is occurring in California, Florida, and Texas:
But this is not occurring in the Northeast, in New York and Pennsylvania:
The historical relationship between new COVID-19 cases and new COVID-19 hospital admissions has broken down in some areas, but not in others. I guess that’s just one more oddity in a pandemic that has been all-but-unpredictable so far.
