This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2020-6-16, and is archived here as a curiosity. Minor changes to formatting, as well as basic copy-edits, may have been made in the transition from Facebook post to web format.
Today, the United States reported 713 new deaths from the coronavirus, down from 949 a week ago (Covid Tracking Project). The seven-day rolling average is 672, down from 827 a week ago. Today's seven-day rolling average is the lowest seven-day rolling average we've seen yet.
When it comes to the number of new cases we're finding, I'm starting to see news stories about a "spike". If they're just talking a local spike here or there, fine. If they're talking about some kind of national "spike", that's not true. If you take the seven-day rolling average, to smooth out all the little day-to-day ups and downs, the seven-day rolling average has walked back and forth between 20,000 and 24,000. That's not a spike -- it's a plateau.
Now, if you're pessimistic and think everything's going to fall apart, you might be right.[1] I don't know. I'm just some unqualified person on Facebook posting graphs and watching to see what's happening next. But if you say we're already seeing a national spike, it's just not there right now. In fact, we continue to keep finding about 22,000 cases per day even though we're testing more and more people. So that's -- at least a bit -- good news.
Time will tell.
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- (2021-6-13) The pessimists were, indeed, right at this point. Over the two weeks following this post (2020-6-16 through 2020-6-30), cases nearly doubled. The can be confirmed via this Covid Tracking Project chart.↩︎