The U.S. remains at 33 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population, up just 15% in the past seven days. This flattening of the curve is due primarily to the Northeast and Midwest regions, which saw no net increase in new cases over the past week.
Continue reading Post #1518: COVID-19 update to 5/23/2022, steady at 33 new cases per 100K
End-of-season edit: When all is said and done, I won’t be doing the sprawl method again with full-sized tomatoes. Maybe I planted these too closely, but I ended up with a tangled mass of vines, weighted down by the fruit. A lot of tomatoes ended up rotting. Either you can’t see them, or you can’t get to them, or they end up on the ground. It’s a lot less effort to grow them, compared to staking them up, but you don’t get much in the end.
Everything else here: Cold-tolerant tomatoes, and electric fence as deer deterrent, gets two thumbs up. I now plan on growing cold-tolerant (short-season) tomatoes every year.
I’m now in Phase III of my four-part tomato strategy for 2022. I outlined that in my first garden post of 2022 (G22-001). It’s time for an update. I’m posting it because otherwise I’ll never be able to recall how things went this season. Continue reading Post G22-018, Sprawl method for tomatoes.
The U.S. now averages 33 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, up 22% in the past seven days. Continue reading Post #1517, COVID-19, finishing the data week, now 33/100K.
At this point, I could probably just copy a post from any random day in the past month or so, and I doubt anyone would notice. New cases continue to grow roughly 25 percent per week. Today’s case count of 31/100K/day is there just a matter of arithmetic, plus or minus some random variation. Continue reading Post #1516, COVID-19 trend, now 31/100K/day, rising 23%/week
The U.S. now stands at just over 30 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, up 33% in the past seven days. Continue reading Post #1515: COVID-19 trend, now 30/100K/day, up 33% in the past week.
The U.S. now stands at 28.5 new cases per 100K per day, up 32% in the past seven days. That’s up from 26, as of last Friday’s reading. Continue reading Post #1514: COVID-19 trend, now 28.5/100K, up 32% in the past week.
The uptick in new COVID-19 cases at William and Mary that started a few weeks back appears to be ending. But, because students have been/continue to leave the campus at the end of the semester, that’s not crystal clear. But the current week continues the downward trend seen last week.
Source: Calculated from William and Mary COVID-19 dashboard, accessed 5-16-2022.
You can see that the infection rate for the comparable (age 18-24) Virginia population rose last week, in line with the overall increase in the official count of new infections in Virginia.
For sure, this is the last usable reading for the semester. Everyone but the Seniors has gone home at this point.
In truth, this is likely to be my last update ever. My daughter graduates this year, and I no longer have a reason to track after that. Let’s hope that by that time fall semester rolls around, the new case rates are so low that nobody need to bother to track it.
Source: Calculated from Federal Reserve of St. Louis (FRED) data, series APU00007471A (gasoline) and CPIAUCSL (CPI), accessed 5/15/2022
In terms of the number of dollar bills you must surrender to purchase one gallon of gasoline, sure, gas is now at an all-time high within living memory.
But, as an economist, I have to point out that a dollar isn’t a dollar any more. It used to be worth quite a bit more. And because of that, it’s just plain stupid to look at long term price trends — or all time highs — in nominal dollars.
In real — that is, inflation-adjusted — terms, the current price of gas in the U.S. is nowhere near at an all-time high. Within living memory. That honor goes to June 2008, when the price of gas in the U.S. hit $5.46 per gallon, in today’s dollars. Continue reading Post #1512: Highest gasoline prices ever? Not really. Not even really close.
The official count is still at 26 new cases per 100K population per day, an increase of 28% over the past seven days. Rounded to the nearest whole number. Same as yesterday.
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 5/13/2022, 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
I guess there are only a few things left to say.
First, nobody really knows what the actual new case count is. That’s been true all along — at best, half of cases were captured by the official reporting — but there’s a nagging suspicion that the gap between the true and official case counts has been rising. Can’t prove it, but between cheap and plentiful home testing, and a large degree of immunity in the population (suggesting that severe cases would become an increasingly small portion of all cases), it’s a good bet that it is. For sure, the last fix we got — via the CDC seroprevalence survey — suggested that the ratio of total infections to official infections was expanding. It used to be a bit above 1:1, but as of the February 2022, cumulative for the entire pandemic, that had risen to 1.4:1. Because that’s cumulative for the entire pandemic, that suggests a pretty large shift in the most recent months, in order to move the entire average up that much.
Source: Post #1498, calculated from CDC seroprevalence survey data, COVID data tracker accessed 5/2/2022.
That said, deaths are still not rising — they are still around 300/day — and hospitalizations still have not reached 3000 per day. So there’s a lot of new cases, but not a lot of severe new cases. As discussed in earlier posts, I’m pretty sure that’s a consequence of the change in the vaccinated/unvaccinated mix of new cases. The vaccine and (particularly) booster still provide good protection against severe illness, even if they provide little protection against getting some COVID-19 infection after a few months.
Finally, this seems like it’s just getting started and/or there seems to be no hint that this is slowing down. Note that the regions that started this the earliest (e.g., the Northeast, top line above) have had cases rising at a more-or-less steady rate since the end of March. (That graphs as a straight line on the log chart at the top of this post). Meanwhile, other regions — most of the middle of the country — are only now joining this wave. Both of those suggest this has a lot longer to run.
Around here, informally at least, I think I’m seeing a turnaround in mask use, as Fairfax County, VA tops 40 new cases per 100K in the official stats. Today, mask use was nearly uniform at both stores I briefly visited. My wife perceives an age gap, as almost all older people are masked, and few younger people are. That makes perfect sense from an every-man-for-himself personal protection standpoint. Which is, I think, all we’re going to have in the U.S. moving forward.
Now 26 new cases per 100K population per day, up 28% in the past week. The BA.2.12.1 wave now looks well-organized in every region except the Mountain states, where Colorado still does not show a strong upward trend.
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 5/13/2022, 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
At this point, new cases are rising almost everywhere. There were only five states where new cases did not increase in the past seven days.
