The U.S. now stands at 17 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, unchanged from three days ago.
Deaths remain around 350 per day. Hospitalizations have finally fallen below 4000 per day.
The slow post-Labor Day decline in new cases continues.
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 9/25/2022, 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 interesting update is that the CDC has started tracking the count of people getting the new (bivalent) COVID-19 vaccine. And it looks like the uptake is as low as it appeared based on anecdote. As of today’s data (9/25/2022), just 4.3 million people had received the new vaccine.
That compares to about:
- 225 million who completed the first vaccine,
- 110 million who got a first booster.
- 25 million who got a second booster.
In that context, 5 million or so for the latest vaccine does not seem all that far off the existing trend. (All the numbers above are from the downloadable data table at CDC COVID data tracker.)
Possibly that will pick up as flu season progresses, and people pick up a dose of COVID-19 vaccine when they get their flu vaccine.
That said, we deliver about 170M flu vaccine doses in a typical year. That vaccine is typically not terribly effective at preventing flu. And flu is not as dangerous as COVID-19, based on the observed death and hospitalization rates that we continue to observe.
Given all that, it doesn’t seem quite rational to me to get a flu shot, but not get a COVID-19 shot. Then again, rationality was not exactly a central theme of the pandemic.
