… but France and Germany appear to be starting theirs.
The U.S. remains at 14 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, same as the end of last week. The downward trend continues, it’s just so slow that it now takes several days to drop another whole case from the daily count.
In particular, in the U.S., there’s no winter wave yet, but the state-level trends seem to be separating by cold/warm states, a bit. Which would be the first indication of a winter wave. So … eh, it’s too soon to tell. But we’re about due for a wave to start, if we’re going to have one.
Deaths are closing in on 300 a day, down from a steady 350 for the past few months. Hospitalizations continue to fall, and currently are at 3200 per day, down a few hundred from the end of last week.
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 10/4/2022, 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
If history is a guide, and if there’s going to be a winter 2022 U.S. wave, it should be starting some time this month. The 2020 wave started in early September, the 2021 (Omicron) wave started in late October. So it’s about time.
But, while we haven’t started a winter wave yet, if you plot the change in daily new cases for the past two weeks, there’s a hint of a north-south differential starting to show up. At least, to my eye, there appears to be something of a north/south color gradient on the map below. It’s not so much the start of an obvious wave of new cases, as it is that the declines in new cases have stopped in the more northerly/higher elevation parts of the country.
Map courtesy of datawrapper.de
Not sure I’d call that the start of a wave. But it may be a wave starting to shape up.
