The slow post-Labor Day decline in reported new U.S. COVID-19 cases continues. The latest reading rounds to 19 new case per 100K per day, down from 21 just a couple of days ago.
Still under 400 deaths a day, hospitalizations stand at 4300 per day.
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 9/17/2022, 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
That said, coronaviruses in general tend to peak mid-winter, and for the past two years, COVID-19 was no exception. Based on that, my expectation remains that we still ought to see new cases begin to rise again later this year. But you never know. Maybe we’ll finally get enough cumulative immunity that we won’t see a wintertime peak this year.
In a continuing odd turn of events, CDC still isn’t tracking the uptake of the latest (bivalent) vaccine, on its COVID data tracker website. As far as the CDC is concerned, vaccination appears to have ended with the second booster dose. I’m not sure whether that’s merely a lag in their data collection and processing, or whether they don’t plan to publicize the uptake of the latest vaccine. My observation — based on a sample of one — is that there doesn’t seem to be much demand for it.
OTOH, CDC hasn’t started putting up the flu vaccine numbers for the 2021-22 flu season yet, either. They won’t start doing that until the end of September (reference). So, plausibly, this is simply their tradition.
The only other thing I noted was that there’s a new strain in town, BF. Turns out, if you look it up (reference), that’s just a substrain of BA.5. So it remains true no new strain has arisen, beyond Omicron.
Source: CDC COVID data tracker, annotation is mine.
