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Current world events have pushed COVID out of the headlines and with numbers continuing to fall, this post will be kept short.
For the week ending on March 6th, there were 294,680 newly reported cases. This was down 32% from the week before. We are seeing the rate of change slow but that’s to be expected and a 32% change is still a big drop.
But I wonder if the false positive rate for Omicron is going to be higher than for early variants making me wonder how low we can actually get. Testing has been dropping but as long as there is testing, we are going to find “cases” whether they are real or not.
Last year, we hit a low during the week ending on March 8th and then we got a bump (mostly due to a big wave in Michigan) but that low was 343,378 cases so we are lower than the spring low from last year.
We had four states (Maine, Montana, Rhode Island and North Carolina) where cases went up last week while they dropped in the rest of the states.
The ten states with the lowest number of cases per million last week were Maryland, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, DC, Indiana, South Carolina, Arizona, Ohio, South Dakota and Florida.
And the tend with the most were Idaho, Montana, Alaska, Maine, West Virginia, Kentucky, Vermont, North Carolina, New Mexico, and California.
Lastly, we’ll just end with the chart of cases vs weekly change. Maine isn’t on the graph because they saw more than a 100% increase and I didn’t want to expand the scales. Still suspect some reporting glitches there. You can also see New York, New Jersey and Delaware creeping back towards the 0 line but we expect that over time as the cases reach whatever the new minimum is going to be. Again, cases can’t get to 0 unless we stop testing.
Even places like Idaho, Montana and Maine look better than they did a few weeks ago so, while they would rank near the bottom, the situation is getting better there as well. The drop is just not as fast as we’ve seen in other places. Overall, it was another week of good news.
Facing Diagonal Wall 