US Covid Through July 23, 2022

I’ve decided (at least for this week) to go back to updating early in the week. Since the CDC numbers are constantly being updated and changed, it doesn’t really matter what point in time we pick. For the totals, I’ll start including updated numbers for the previous week as part of the summary.

For the last week, there were 840,225 newly reported cases. For the week before, the updated total was 905,486. We have incomplete data for North and South Carolina so the case number for last week will certainly increase as that data comes in. But it seems safe to assume we aren’t going to see the same type of increase we saw two weeks ago when cases jumped by 16%.

The number of tests is missing data from the weekend so it isn’t worth mentioning. With the updates for previous weeks, we have seen tests increase for two weeks in a row but still remain at very low levels. With cases rising, it is expected that we’d see some increase in cases.

You can ignore North and South Carolina on the graph below. Certainly, the numbers for all states are subject to change as updated data comes in to the CDC but I’d suspect that those changes wouldn’t be that big.

We saw big increases in DC and Massachusetts last week and relatively big increases in Kentucky and Indiana but cases were essentially flat in most states. The three states in upper New England (Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont) all saw drops and they are at very low levels compared to the rest of the country. The rest of the Northeast hasn’t really followed along just yet.

At this time last year, the Delta wave was starting to take off in the South and that will become more obvious in the next couple of weeks. But it also means that a few states (Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri and Nevada) have lower totals this year than they did at this time last year. The Carolinas also make that list but that is just due to missing data.

But the majority of states still have more cases this year than they did at this time last year, including the three with the lowest totals (Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire)

The ten states with the fewest number of cases last week were Vermont, South Carolina, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Maine, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. If we kick out the Carolinas, the next two would be Minnesota and South Dakota.

Of those 10, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Pennsylvania and Michigan all were in the top ten for fewest cases last year at this time. And Minnesota ranked 8th last year and South Dakota ranked 3rd. So we again see some correlation where cases tend to be lower in the Northeast and upper Midwest at this time of year.

The ten states with the most cases (per million) were California, Florida, Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, West Virginia, New Mexico, Alaska, Louisiana and Oklahoma. Of those, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Alaska and Oklahoma also were among the top ten with most cases at this time last year. The south is the hot spot during this time of year.

These trends are likely to hold through the summer and then we’ll see things cycle to different states. It is interesting that last year was Delta and this year is whatever version of Omicron we are on but a lot of the basic patterns remain the same.

The final numbers will change but case numbers were similar to last week and we again aren’t seeing any real explosive growth anywhere. Much of the movement appears to be seasonal and most states are seeing higher number of cases than they were at this time last year.