If you’ve been following along, you know the drill at that point. Holidays disrupt the COVID-19 numbers. Mostly, that’s just a disruption of data reporting. But to some smaller degree, there will typically be a drop in formally-diagnosed new cases, once all the dust has settled. Plausibly, people who are only mildly ill will be more likely to forego a formal test if their symptoms appear on a holiday.
As a result, you have to wait a couple of days past the holiday, in the hopes that the numbers will bounce back to their true trend.
FWIW, on paper, the U.S. stands at 23 new cases per 100K per day, down three from the Friday before Labor Day. I expect that will bounce up a bit yet, based on what appears to be under-reporting in California.
That said, reported hospitalizations are down to 4400 per day, deaths are down to 350. Both of those are improvements over the pre-Labor-Day period.
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 9/3/2022, 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
Best guess, the downward drift in new cases that began in August is continuing, maybe accelerating a bit, in September.
