Yet another few days of sketchy data from the states, and I think I can say that new COVID-19 cases have stopped rising. Might even be falling, depending on how I choose to gap-fill the data. In hindsight, what looked like the possible start of a 2022 winter wave was just a weird little blip.
As the night follows the day, some people are going to explain last week’s increase in cases as some after-effect of Thanksgiving gatherings. Before you believe that, recall that Canadian Thanksgiving is in October. And yet …
Source: Johns Hopkins data via Google search.
Note that the Canadian increase was quite short-lived. Depending on how I gap-fill the increasingly sketchy U.S. data, I can obtain that sort of a pattern as well. This is my “new” algorithm, below. (If I’d stuck with the “old” algorithm, I’d merely see a flattening of the curve at the end, not an outright decline).
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 12/13/2022, 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
So, what was that? Beats me. The fact that we saw the coincident rise in Canada seems to rule out most explanations (real or data-related) based on U.S. Thanksgiving. But the similar shapes of the regional curves suggest otherwise — that’s what you’d see if this were a mere data reporting glitch that neither of my algorithms handles correctly. I’m just going to leave it with “I don’t know”.
Winter wave? No winter wave? Not much of a winter wave? I don’t know.
