End of April 2022 – US COVID – Are we Done?

We’ll start with a snarky note. The biggest of the big shot experts said we were clearly out of the pandemic phase. That alone is probably reason to panic.

Overall, we continue to be in the same pattern we’ve been in for the last couple of weeks. Cases continue to move up and more states are seeing increases. Overall numbers remain low. There is also some evidence to suggest that we are closing in on peaks in parts of the Northeast where most of the new cases have been.

For the week ending on April 24th, there were 317,221 newly reported cases which was up 25% from the previous week. Now 25% is the biggest increase we’ve seen in this period and this was the highest number of newly reported cases since the week ending on February 27th.

On the other hand, despite three weeks in a row of double digit increases, we still haven’t doubled the number of cases we had at the low which was 180,158 for the week ending April 3rd. That is consistent with what we see last spring and not with the type of explosive growth you see in actual waves. And we remain under where we were at this time last year although the margin keeps slipping because we were definitely seeing cases drop by this time last year.

The ten states with the highest number of cases were Vermont, New York, DC, Alaska, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Illinois and Maine. Again, because DC was on the list, there are eleven listed but only ten states. This remains an issue in the Northeast but Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island did see cases drop last week. And New Jersey saw a very small increase so, again, things may be peaking there.

Just for fun, I’ve got a new graph showing 2022 vs 2021. So this is cases per million for last week vs the same week last year. Missouri didn’t make the graph because they had a reporting correction this time last year and showed negative cases so I didn’t expand the graphs into nonsense territory.

There is some correlation between this year and last year which isn’t that shocking if you think seasonality is a thing.

If you look at 20 states with the highest number of cases, 15 of them made the list in both years – New York, Alaska, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Illinois, Maine, Washington, Delaware, Oregon, Minnesota, Michigan and Florida.

Again, last year at this time, cases were going down. That isn’t the case this year but it still looks a lot more like what we saw in April of last year than some new wave. The panic level should remain low but it just needs to be watched.