The U.S. now stands at 29 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population, down from 31 a few days back, and down 10% in the past seven days. The graph of new cases by region is now starting to show a well-defined U.S. peak.
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 6/21/2022, 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
It’s about time. This is the first day of summer, and we should proceed to a summertime lull in new cases. And, now that all the regions are trending downward, the decline for the U.S. as a whole ought to start picking up speed.
The wave of the formerly-cautious
Anecdotally, I’d have to call this most recent set of new cases the “end of cautions” phase of the pandemic. In the past couple of weeks, within my own tiny circle of acquaintances, I’ve heard of three different COVID infections in families that were cautious and COVID-free to this point.
For that matter, Dr. Fauci got infected last week.
For my own part, I note that masking in the stores is almost non-existent around here now. That’s a good match for U.S data, which show the lowest level of mask use since Carnegi-Mellon began tracking this during the pandemic:
Source: Carnegie-Mellon COVIDcast.
Another indicator is U.S. air travel, which has almost completely recovered to the pre-pandemic level. So people are no longer hesitant to fly, mask or no mask.
Source: Calculated from US TSA data.
The result of those changes should be reasonably predictable, given how much virus remains in circulation in the population. The people who had previously taken significant precautions now become the last remaining large reservoir of people ripe for infection, as those precautions are dropped. And the last wave of the pandemic is the wave of the formerly-cautious.
It’s not as if the risks are high for the vaccinated and boostered. We’re still well under 300 COVID deaths per day, and just over 4000 COVID hospitalizations per day, both of which are concentrated among the elderly.
Absent some new and even-more-infectious variant of COVID — something that seems bordering on impossible, given how ridiculously infectious the current dominant variants are — I think this ought to be the end of it for now. And, near as I can tell, there’s nothing like a new and even-more-threatening variant on anybody’s radar screens at the moment.
The other human coronaviruses tend to have a wintertime peak, just like flu. That’s what I’d expect to see going forward for COVID-19.
I’ve said this before, and at some risk of error, I’ll say it again. Maybe it’s time to end the COVID-related portion of this blog, and return to whatever it was I did prior to to the pandemic. My expectation and hope is that, moving forward, COVID tracking will soon become the most boring hobby in the U.S.
