On paper, the U.S. number jumped to 40 new cases per 100K per day with today’s data reporting, up from the low 30’s just previous. In practice, most of that is just the echo of the July 4th holiday’s impact on data report. We’ll know more tomorrow.Just to recap how this keeps happening, every body reports out a seven-day moving average of the data. With that, you don’t much care how the states report their data (every day versus once-a-week), as long as they report it the same way, week-after-week.
When you have a Monday holiday, that disturbs the “report it the same way” criterion. You take all cases that should normally have been reported on Monday, and dump them into Tuesday. Hence, the week that started with Tuesday, July 5th has, in effect, more than seven days’ worth of cases in it.
Just for the record, there is no good way to remove this effect from the data. At least, no good, simple, and reliable way.
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 7/12/2022, 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
We’ll know more about the true trend, if any, tomorrow.
I hate the popular press
I have to start this section by saying that I’m double-boosted and continue to wear a high-filtration mask in indoor public spaces.
There has been a spate of articles lately along the lines of “BA.5, be very afraid”, this is the next big wave, and so on. I remain skeptical.
The simple fact that never seems to merit mention is that more than half of U.S. cases are already BA.5. And, during the entire time that BA.5 was taking over from prior variants, new U.S. cases have been more-or-less completely unchanged.
Nobody seems to put much focus on the actual negative trend, which is that hospital admissions for COVID continue to rise despite a level official case count:
Source: CDC COVID data tracker.
All of that blather about the next great wave pales, however, against headlines screaming that booster shots are only 20% effective!!!. Only if you get into the details of the reporting, you find that this is:
- from a non-peer-reviewed study in Italy.
- for 9 months post-booster.
- for any symptomatic infection (not for hospitalization and death).
Oh, and it’s a study of a third booster dose, to boot — not routinely available in the U.S. anyway. And, not stated but likely, it’s probably observational data, not a controlled trial.
The antibodies from booster doses wear off pretty quickly. That’s been known for some time. You get a few months of enhanced resistance to new infection, and continues high resistance to serious infection (hospital or death). But that’s about it. Which, when you think about it, is why they had booster doses in the first place, right?
But it’s great click-bait. So it makes the headlines.
Nattering nabobs of negativism indeed.
