Now that we are past the test-reporting artifacts from Juneteenth, it’s clear that new COVID-19 cases are trending upward. The U.S. stands at 35 new cases per 100K per day, up 20% in the past seven days.
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 6/29/2022, 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
Here’s the same data, in the context of the three years of the pandemic. You sort of lose sight of the fact that even with all the now-unreported cases due to the rise of home testing, the official count is still well above where it stood for most of the pandemic.
I guess the thing to keep your eye on now is the presence of serious illness. We’re back over 300 daily deaths, and we’re closing in on 5000 daily new COVID-19 hospitalizations.
Source: CDC COVID data tracker.
That hospitalization rate remains something of a puzzle. In Mid-May, the case hospitalization rate was under 3.5%. Now it’s closing in on 5%. No idea what’s driving that.
