Posted by 
Was with the siblings for a few days. Funny bit of conversation that I stayed out of was when they were talking about COVID isn’t even in the news anymore. Like it had just been forgotten. Two reasons for that. First, the news has moved on to the next thing to care about. Secondly, COVID numbers remain low. Boring when compared to an actual war so it gets pushed off the front pages.
I do wonder if this is worth continuing. Our state just changed the dashboard and is now only reporting three days a week so what I had been tracking is no longer available. I guess there is part of me that is waiting for an end which will likely just be when they stop testing and reporting the numbers.
I guess there was a mistake in the numbers I posted last week. The corrected total of newly reported cases was 182,534 which was a decrease from the previous week. This past week the total was 180,342 and that is also down slightly from the week before. Taken together, it now means that the weekly total has dropped for eleven straight weeks.
Granted the last two have been drops of 2.4 and 1.2% so it is more like we are reaching a bottom than seeing big drops. I also do a running seven day total and that has ticked back up so I continue to think that we are going to see a small upturn soon.
But to give an overall perspective, I’ve got this graph showing daily reported cases. This just show how far we have come from early January.
We did have 22 states where cases went up last week so we are continuing to see increases in more places. While some of them are big changes in terms of percentage, the actual numbers remain low. There were also six places (Arizona, New York, DC, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont) that saw an increase from four weeks ago. I use that to try and better gauge a long term trend from a short term bump. But even in those places, we still aren’t seeing real explosive exponential growth so I wouldn’t be overly concerned just yet.
The graph below shows cases per million against the weekly change. Alaska saw a small drop but still has the highest total of cases per million in the country. It is like they’ve just stalled out at this level. Arizona didn’t make the graph because the change was greater than 100% and I didn’t want to expand the scale. Arizona is down to reporting just one day a week so it isn’t clear whether this was a real increase or just clearing of some older tests.
After Alaska and Arizona, the other states with the highest number of cases were Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, Connecticut, New Jersey and DC. Vermont was higher than Arizona so they ranked second with Arizona third and then the rest of the list above. Clearly the increases and high cases are centered in the Northeast.
To put that into perspective, this is the graph of the Northeast. We did see a similar pattern last year where, after the winter wave ended, cases bounced back up a bit in the late spring before declining to almost zero in June/July. The good news is that the numbers this year are lower than they were at this period last year even though the peaks in the winter were significantly higher. The real point here is that this is the “worst” region in the country right now but it looks good when compared to previous history.
Overall, we remain in a situation where cases are declining in most states. The rate of decline has certainly slowed as we continue to approach a bottom so it would not be a shock to see things start to go up again. But, even where cases are rising, the overall number of cases remains low when compared to this time last year. Another week of good news on the COVID front.
Facing Diagonal Wall 