The U.S. now stands at 32 new COVID-19 cases per 100K per day, up from 30 yesterday. And 29 the day before that. Maybe that’s a blip, but it’s a fairly widespread blip. It might or might not be some unanticipated artifact of the recent Juneteenth holiday.
That said, it’s just another indication that this current Omicron wave doesn’t appear to be ending any time soon. If that thought is insufficiently depressing, re-read the last portion of yesterday’s post.
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 6/25/2022, 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
The only other piece of information I can find to check those case-count trends is the Carnegie-Mellon Univesity COVIDcast survey. Based on the number of survey respondents reporting COVID-like symptoms, it appears true that new case rates are not falling, and may be rising slightly.
Source: Carnegie-Mellon University COVIDcast, accessed 6/25/2022.
In any case, we just passed the dates of the 2020 and 2021 summertime lows. So … I’m not sure what that means. Either the seasonality of the prior two years was an illusion, or the current situation is quite different.
Should I even consider the possibility that we may have already passed our low for 2022? It’s way too early to say something like that. On the other hand, we’re in a situation where neither vaccination nor prior infection gives much protection against a new infection. The disease is ridiculously infectious compared to other commonly-circulating respiratory viruses. And as far as I can see locally, COVID hygiene has all-but-disappeared. Lots of cases, some hospitalizations, few deaths? That’s not an implausible scenario going forward
