We’ve definitely hit a plateau in daily new cases. We’ve been at 12 / 100K / day for well over two weeks now, and it’s reached the point where that flat spot is easily visible on the graph of new cases.
Still, there’s no uptick in Canada, no clear north/south differential in the U.S., and Europe seems to be getting over its “winter wave”, such as it was.
So this level of virus in circulation in the U.S. may just be the new normal.
Graphs follow.
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 10/21/2022, 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
Nothing much happening in Canada. If we were entering a wave associated with colder weather, presumably we’d see some sort of uptick there first:
Source: Johns Hopkins via Google search.
Not a lot of action in Europe either. If anything, it looks like their winter wave is a dud.
Source: Our World in Data
There’s no longer any sort of north/south or mountain/other pattern in the two-week change in cases across U.S. states.
Map courtesy of datawrapper.de.
At this point, I’d say this is one dead horse that has been thoroughly beaten.
Footnote: Another bit of weirdness from the CDC.
My wife and I jokingly refer to the U.S. Web Designer Full Employment Act, a piece of Federal legislation that requires every U.S.-based commercial website to be redesigned as soon as the majority of users have gotten used to it, or every 12 months, whichever is less.
Apparently the US CDC COVID data tracker has now triggered its mandatory WeDeFuEmAc revisions. Whereas you used to be able to find average daily cases, deaths, and hospitalizations, that information is no longer available. Instead, for whatever reason, you can only get weekly data, and you can no longer get any information on hospitalizations on the main set of graphs.
There is, of course, no explanation for the change.
Finally, CDC still makes you dig for it if you want to know the number of people who’ve gotten the new bivalent vaccine. (You have to download the data table below the state map). As of today, they list 19.4M people who have gotten the new bivalent vaccine.
So, weirdly, if you want to know how many people got the original vaccine, that’s all nicely tabulated for you. And completely irrelevant at this point. But if you want to know how many got the current vaccine, you have to download a file into Excel and hunt for it. I can only guess that the low takeup is not something the CDC wants to emphasize.
