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Well I thought I wasn’t going to another post this year but the numbers are interesting and worth discussing.
For the week ending on December 26th, there were 1,549,859 newly reported cases which is the highest weekly total since the first week in January of this year when we had 1,723,433 newly reported cases. It does go down as the second highest weekly total for the US since this whole thing started. Given the totals for the first two days of this week, I think we are going to shatter the all time record for cases this week and see another big increase.
This is what it looks like.
Just to give you a sneak preview, the numbers for Monday and Tuesday were both between 425,000 and 450,000 newly reported cases. In other words, the lines for next week won’t fit on the scale I’ve been using for this graph.
I won’t do the state graphs because the potential disruptions over Christmas mean that we might be seeing patterns that aren’t real. What I will do is just list them in order of the number of cases reported last week. Again, this is cases per million which adjusts for populations differences.
In order, from smallest to largest, we have:
- Montana
- Alaska
- Idaho
- Mississippi
- Wyoming
- Oregon
- South Carolina
- Washington
- Utah
- Nevada
- Louisiana
- California
- Arkansas
- South Dakota
- Alabama
- Nebraska
- Oklahoma
- Kansas
- Missouri
- Texas
- New Mexico
- Arizona
- West Virginia
- Indiana
- North Dakota
- Vermont
- Minnesota
- Michigan
- North Carolina
- Kentucky
- Colorado
- Iowa
- Tennessee
- Georgia
- Maine
- Virginia
- Wisconsin
- Pennsylvania
- New Hampshire
- Connecticut
- Hawaii
- Ohio
- Delaware
- Maryland
- Massachusetts
- Florida
- Illinois
- Rhode Island
- New York
- New Jersey
- DC
One interesting observation from where I live since I do a more detailed look at the numbers here. We had been slowly coming down from the second Delta wave which peaked in early December but we are now starting to see the Omicron wave take off. Right now, it is really limited to two regions. The one in the center of the state where I live and where we have the most people. And one in the northwest corner which borders a much larger city in a neighboring state. Just happen to be two of the places with the highest population density.
Now I should state that while the increases in cases are alarming, data from other places strongly suggest this is a very mild version of the virus. It is a little too early yet to say that here, but cases in the US started going almost exponential on December 15th but there is currently no sign of a significant increase in deaths. Deaths do lag but we should be starting to see signs.
Facing Diagonal Wall 