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After two weeks of declines, cases jumped up last week. For the week ending on June 12th, there were 741,530 newly reported cases which was an increase of about 6% from the week before.
California saw cases jump by 23% last week and that made up over half of the increase. Given that California only reports twice a week, it is possible we are just seeing the delayed impact of Memorial Day. Texas and Florida made up about 22% of the increase so three states are responsible for 78% of the increase. And the increases in Texas and Florida didn’t look alarming.
Its what happens when cases go up in big states. Other states that had relatively large number of increased cases were Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee, Nevada, Utah and Arizona. In the last two years, we’ve seen cases rise in the South and Southwest during the summer so that may be starting to kick in as cases fall in the Northeast.
There were 20 states that saw cases drop last week and most of them are in the Northeast. The biggest percentage increase was in Wyoming so I had to expand the scale of the graph below to cover it.
Other than Wyoming, we had relatively big increases in Kansas, Arkansas and South Dakota but they still have low numbers of actual cases. Even where cases were going up, in most places, it remains the slow, gradual upward trend and not the type of rapid increases we saw in previous waves. And cases have been rising for many weeks in a lot of places and it isn’t clear how long this type of slow, upward trend can last.
The ten states with the fewest cases per million last week were South Dakota, Vermont, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire, Indiana, Maine, Arkansas and North Dakota. Four states from the Northeast which just offers further confirmation that the late spring wave there is over.
The ten states with the most cases per million last week were Hawaii, Florida, California, Alaska, New Mexico, Nevada, Illinois, New Jersey, Oregon, DC, and Washington. Alaska just can’t seem to catch a break as cases remain high there. Kind of clustered in the West – all along the Pacific Coast and into parts of the Southwest.
And numbers continue to be much higher than last year at this time. In this week last year, there were no states with more than 1000 cases per million. This year, all of the states are above that mark. Or to put it more simply, cases are higher than they were last year at this time in every state.
Not a great week but not really that alarming. If we see cases really start to break out in some places, that would be different.
Facing Diagonal Wall 