The U.S. stands at 21 new cases per 100K per day, up one from the end of last week. That said, by eye, the overall slow decline in new cases appears to be continuing.
We still have about 350 deaths and 4500 new hospitalizations per day.
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 9/14/2022, 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
Ignore the jumble of apparent one-week growth rates above. Those are still scrambled by the Labor Day reporting issues. The true picture, excluding the data reporting glitches, is much more nearly uniform.
Separately, my wife and I got the new bivalent COVID vaccine and the flu shot a couple of days ago. There didn’t seem to be a lot of demand, compared to last time. We were the only ones there, at our local Safeway, getting vaccinated. I also note that the CDC isn’t (yet?) tracking the volume of the latest vaccine being delivered, but the data on the CDC COVID data tracker is a week old, and they may literally not have the data yet for the volume of new vaccines delivered.
Near as I can tell, it’s still the case that vaccination gives a significant but temporary degree of protection against any symptomatic illness, even with the BA.4 and BA.5 strains. (We’re attending a wedding in a few days, and figured the timing was right for getting that extra bit of protection). But after a couple of months, it doesn’t do much to prevent a COVID infection. That said, it still provides a long-lasting degree of protection against serious illness from COVID.
