COVID – Cases Rise Again?

Data as of July 17, 2022

The bad news is that cases were up 13% last week with 876,104 newly reported cases. This was the biggest jump in new cases since the week ending on May 22 and the highest number of newly reported cases since the week ending on February 13th. I can’t really attribute this to catch up from July 4th since the numbers for that week weren’t way down.

Reporting testing also continues to drop and that has some impact on the number of cases which may be higher than reported if people have stopped getting tested and are just having mild symptoms.

North Carolina continues to be a problem as the database I used from the CDC had them with 0 cases from July 13th. So just ignore them on any graphs you see below. Oklahoma which had some delays in reporting last week caught up this week and they ended up with a huge percentage increase in cases and didn’t make the following graph because I didn’t expand the scale as this week was something of an anomaly for Oklahoma

Cases were down in six states and DC so the increase was pretty much across the country. Outside of Oklahoma, the largest percentage increases were observed in Virginia, Wyoming and Kentucky.

In terms of cases per million, the ten states with the highest number of reported cases last week were Oklahoma, California, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Alaska, New Mexico, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. Alaska continues to see high numbers while most of the rest of the states are in the south. Including California, these would be places where we’d expect cases to rise just due to seasonality although it seems like there is more than just that going on here.

The ten states with the fewest cases reported last week were Vermont, North Carolina, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Iowa and Michigan. A high concentration in the Northeast but we are missing New York and New Jersey which ranked 32nd and 34th respectively. So the divergence in the Northeast continues.

Last year at this time, we were seeing cases rise as we had the Delta wave. We were in the second week of five consecutive weeks of 40%-70% increases and we reached a peak the first week in September. This year, we are starting from a much higher level so I doubt we’d see those type of increases again. But it shouldn’t be too shocking if we see things continue to go up from here.

This shows cases per million vs a year ago. Once again, every state is higher than where they were last year although Missouri was close to the same number. What is interesting is that last year Missouri had one of the highest numbers in the nation while this year, they are right in the middle.

There is still correlation between the years. Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania were among the ten lowest at this time last year. And Arkansas, Louisiana, Alaska, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and Oklahoma were among the ten highest at this time last year.

Ignoring North Carolina, Missouri ranks as the state showing the biggest drop from this time last year and West Virginia had the biggest rise. This is in terms of where they ranked. In terms of actual cases per million, California had the biggest increase from this time last year.

Overall, cases went up last week across most of the country. The current hot spots are in the South which was also true last year. The Northeast has the lowest totals and that was also generally true last year. Cases this year remain higher than last year in all states.