The U.S. now stands at 41 new COVID-19 cases per 100K per day. Basically, it’s still at the level that showed up yesterday, due to July 4th data reporting issues.
I think we’re still looking at July 4th data reporting issues. For several large states (e.g., California), I can see that what was routinely a large count of cases reported on a Tuesday because a large count of cases reported on Wednesday, following July 4th.
So even though this is not what I expected to see, at all, I’m still not ready to suggest that there’s some new wave of cases building. That may or may not be true. We may or may not be on an upward trend.. Even if so, I don’t think it’s anything near as sharp an upturn as today’s count suggests. At least some of what showed up today is an artifact of delayed data reporting following the July 4th weekend.
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 7/13/2022, 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
Give it one more day for the data reporting issues to settle out.
That said, the CDC now shows that new COVID-19 hospitalization now top 5600 per day. It was not all that long ago that they topped 5000. So there’s a long and strong upward trend in COVID-19 hospitalizations that seems to be getting next-to-no attention. And for sure, is getting no formal explanation.
Finally, BA.5 now accounts for two-thirds of new cases. Together, BA.5 and BA.4 account for 80% or so. My conclusion is that whatever this change in variants is going to do, it should already have done it.
Source: CDC COVID data tracker.
