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Saw a recent survey that roughly 70% of people in the US think that Covid is just something we have to learn to live with. Assuming Omicron fades with the weather, that number may grow.
Let’s just start with something slightly different – a graph showing weekly change vs cases per million. These are the two components of the arbitrary rating scale I use. The logic is to look at both the current case load and some idea of the trend.
I might revisit this as cases start to flatten in certain places. At some point, the case count will get so low that you won’t see big drops from week to week so you’ll see some of the states in the lower left corner start to move towards the center. But the lower left corner is where the top states are going to be – low cases numbers and a downward trend.
The trend that has been true for the last couple of weeks remains true. The states in the Northeast that saw the big Omicron wave first are now seeing cases drop and rank highest. Most of the country is seeing cases drop but there are a few places that were late to the Omicron wave and they now rank near the bottom.
As we go to the graphs, you’ll see that we still have a long way to get back to pre wave levels so we should expect further drops everywhere. The rate may start to slow in the Northeast but they are ahead of the rest of the country and, unless there is an Omicron 2.0 wave, they’ll likely remain near the top for a bit.
- New York (2)
- New Jersey (4)
- Rhode Island (5)
- Pennsylvania (9)
- Connecticut (10)
- Vermont (11)
- Maine (12)
- Massachusetts (15)
- New Hampshire (25)
- Maryland (1)
- DC (3)
- Delaware (7)
- North Carolina (8)
- Virginia (17)
- Ohio (6)
- Wisconsin (13)
- Illinois (21)
- Michigan (30)
- Indiana (35)
- Tennessee (31)
- West Virginia (40)
- Kentucky (47)
- Florida (14)
- South Carolina (27)
- Georgia (28)
- Alabama (29)
- Mississippi (36)
- South Dakota (24)
- Iowa (26)
- Nebraska (34)
- North Dakota (42)
- Minnesota (45)
- Arkansas (18)
- Texas (19)
- Missouri (22)
- Louisiana (23)
- Kansas (37)
- Oklahoma (48)
- Colorado (20)
- Utah (38)
- Idaho (39)
- New Mexico (43)
- Wyoming (46)
- Montana (49)
- Hawaii (16)
- Nevada (32)
- Arizona (33)
- California (44)
- Oregon (41)
- Washington (50)
- Alaska (51)
I forgot to mention that I look at more than the one week change to try and assess trend. Take Alaska in the graph above. The weekly change was small but cases are still significantly higher than they’ve been so that gets factored in. It isn’t perfect because since most of the country was seeing declines, Alaska would still have ranked near the bottom even with just a small increase.
The nine states that saw cases go up last week ranked from the largest to smallest increase were Montana, Kentucky, Washington, Maine, Minnesota, Idaho, Wyoming, Alaska and Georgia. Maine is a bit of an oddball because case counts are relatively low there.
For most states, case counts are dropping. The trend started in the Northeast and will continue to push west and south over the next weeks. The Omicron wave is clearly on the way out.
Facing Diagonal Wall 