In a little over a week, reported daily new cases in the U.S. fell from 15/100k/day to 12/100k/day.
That said, CDC still reports about 550 COVID-19 deaths per day, and over 4000 COVID-19 hospitalizations per day.
Which is a bit odd, if you think about it.
But if you stare at the CDC website long enough, it sure looks like COVID-19 is increasingly becoming a disease of the oldest old, or, at least, a reportable disease of the oldest old. Which would nicely reconcile the bits of data above.
Details follow.
I have rebased my graphs to begin with 1/1/2023.
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 2/2/2023, 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
Here’s the comparison versus just over a week ago.
Note: Detail may not match totals because the states report sketchy data these days, and historical numbers in some states are subject to revision for up to a month. In other words, both the new numbers and the old numbers change with each new batch of data now.
The aging of the COVID population
Finally, as far as reported cases go, we’ve seen an inversion of the age structure over the course of the year. At the peak of the Omicron wave (January 2022), new cases rates were far higher in children than in the elderly. By the time we get to January 2023, new case rates are far higher among the oldest old.
Source: CDC COVID data track, annotations in red are mine.
Note that there’s no abrupt shift. We’ve seen a smooth, year-long transition from a situation in which COVID-19 incidence was far higher among the young, to the reverse.
It’s tough to say what this means, exactly.
On the one hand, maybe the true count of new cases has shifted from the younger population to the oldest old. One plausible way that might happen is if immunity fades faster among the elderly. (I believe that, in general, that’s true.) A second way that could happen, I think, is if COVID’s ability to avoid the immune system has increased, so that those with lower general immunity (the oldest old) are now most at risk.
Either way, it’s plausible that this year-long change in reported cases is actually tracking the trend in true (reported and un-reported) new COVID cases. It’s plausible that COVID is now concentrated among the elderly.
On the other hand, it’s also plausible that this is merely an artifact of testing. Maybe we’re only seeing formal PCR tests for the oldest old, who are at greatest risk from the disease. E.g., those are the folks who will show up in the doctor’s office for a bad case of flu. Likely, they are the ones who show up for a bad case of COVID. So the cases that we see — in the official statistics — are biased by the likely severity of illness, and likelihood of contact with the health care system, once they have some sort of respiratory illness.
If it’s the latter — if the younger population of the U.S. is sufficiently blasé about COVID, and don’t bother to see a doctor or get tested if they have a respiratory illness — then the true amount of COVID-19 in circulation is much higher than what the official testing data are showing.
I don’t think there’s any way to tell.
Finally, flu season continues to fade.
Green is good.
One reporting week ago:
This reporting week:
Source: CDC Fluview.
