US COVID – Going Back Up??

Like I mentioned last week, many states reported zero cases over the weekend and it does look like the CDC is not going to try and adjust those based on Monday’s total. That meant we got a big bump in cases on Monday and it did lead to the first weekly increase in nine weeks. It wasn’t a big increase but when you look at the rest of the week outside of Monday, we do see week over week increases on two other days.

As the graph above shows, we did big jumps on both Monday and Tuesday so I can’t put all this on the change in CDC reporting. At the very least, we may have hit a bottom. The next couple of weeks will likely tell the story.

For the week ending on Halloween, there were 499,687 newly reported positive cases and that was a 13% increase from last week but still not above the total from two weeks ago so it wasn’t a giant increase. Perhaps more concerning is that the percentage of positives was 5.7% which is up from 4.5% last week. It does provide support that we’ve hit a bottom and that we may now see another upward wave in a lot of places.

I’ll go through the graphs without much comment. You’ll see several states with an increase but until we get next week’s data, we won’t know how much of this is an artifact of the change in CDC reporting.

Cases declined in Delaware but seemed to flatten in the other states.

Increases in all states except Ohio.

Still had declines in all three states although the rate of change slowed in West Virginia.

Alabama must have had a big dump in past cases because there was a big spike on Monday. I’m not going to make too much of it. We continue to see the rate of declines slow in all states as they approach a bottom.

Cases up in all places so we wait for next week.

Kansas and Missouri turned back up but still had declines elsewhere.

Can’t explain Idaho. Big increases in the New Mexico, Utah and Colorado but we need more data to confirm.

Does look like we’ve reached a bottom in all but Nevada. We’ll see if the trends continue next week.

Slight drop in Alaska while the other two appear flat.

The overall summary is we don’t yet know if we are seeing the beginning of a new upturn or if things are just going to flatten out for a bit. Next week might provide some additional clarity.