The question is and isn’t serious. The answer is no. The reason is that a lack of trend isn’t click-bait.
But the serious point is that sometimes you have to figure out what’s going on by what’s not being said. Silence on this issue means it probably went away. Not just because it’s not clickbait any longer, but also because those who flacked the trend never come back to apologize for making a poor prediction.
Not that it isn’t the right time of the year for it. Right along with flu. So I think it’s newsworth that we’re not seeing a trend, FWIW. But I realize I’m the outlier there.
In any case, a few weeks back, you could scarcely open a news website without seeing a reminder that COVID-19 cases were rising. Then I realized I hadn’t been hearing about that lately.
Sure enough, in Virginia, and maybe in the U.S., COVID appears to have peaked in early September. For now, at least.
Your Name Here
Virginia, to my surprise, continues to track counts of positive PCR tests and other indicators, thus making it easy to track tends. So that’s where I’m starting, because the data are familiar, consistent, and timely.
It looks like new cases in Virginia peaked in early September. Like so, current through November 3, 2023:
Source: Virginia Department of Health.
That indicator is reinforced by data from (roughly speaking) an independent source. (The data source is cited as CDC, and it may be based on a sample of “reporting” hospitals in some CDC network.) The fraction of hospital ER/OPD visits that test positive for COVID, in Virginia, peaked on or about the same time.
Source: Virginia Department of Health.
Nationally, the CDC doesn’t track cases, and what it does track, it tracks with some lags. That said, the only trend in the basic COVID counts data that is still positive is deaths. Everything else seems to have peaked — kind of when Virginia peaked. For now.
Source: That element of the Deep State currently disguising itself with the initialism CDC. Note that the crafty bastards didn’t bother to put axes on their graphs, this providing plausible deniability should these prove to be false. You want axes with that, you gotta pay extra.
The upshot is that sometimes the news is what you’re not hearing. Not hearing about the big upward trend in COVID these days? That’s because it seems to have fizzled out. For now.
I infer that AI is not a big fan of Simon and Garfunkel
Below are responses to the prompt “the sound of silence”, from Gencraft and Freepik AIs. Apparently “silence” equates to lakes and forests, mostly, in the AI mind.
Some of the pictures are pretty. Some of them are pretty weird. Some of them look like places I’d like to live, or at least visit for a while.
Typical AI output, in other words. So why not share it?
