US Covid – Going, Going, …

With UFO’s replacing COVID in the daily headlines, there may not be much interest but I kind of want to continue to document the decline and fall of COVID.

Last week, there were 259,339 newly reported cases which was down about 8% from the previous week. It is the lowest total of new cases for a week since the week ending on April 13th where there were 229,024 newly reported cases.

The FDA website has not reported on testing volume in the last three weeks. Don’t know if this means they’ve just given up or if the data has just become too spotty to be meaningful. At the recent levels, it was of limited use so it isn’t a big loss.

While the overall total dropped, there were 24 states that saw an increase in cases from the previous week. So the overall total is partially driven by big declines in a few states that had a large number of cases. Cases were down 26% in Texas, 12% in New York, 19% in Florida, 22% in New Jersey and 16% in Tennessee. There were declines of more than 20% as well in Wyoming, Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Maine, Arkansas, Rhode Island and Hawaii.

And, even where cases were up, the increases were mostly small. Only Colorado and Nebraska saw increases of more than 20%. Missouri, Michigan, Kentucky, Alaska, Mississippi, West Virginia and Minnesota saw cases go up by more than 10%. In the other 14 states, the increase was less than 10%.

As the graph shows, even though Colorado saw a large increase, the actual number of cases remains among the lowest in the country. Utah didn’t report any cases this week so they show up at the bottom left of the graph.

Excluding Utah, the ten states with the fewest reported cases (per million) last week were Hawaii, Nevada, Wyoming, Arizona, Arkansas, New Mexico, Iowa, Idaho, Colorado and Connecticut.

And the ten with the most reported cases per million last week were Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Dakota, North Dakota, Louisiana, Alaska, and West Virginia. Some of these states were on the biggest decliners so the trend is positive in a lot of these states.

May not update again for a bit. Depends on the data. I thought the fact that we are now back to April levels was a good reason to talk about this again. Overall, COVID does seem to be fading away.