This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2020-7-7, 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 51,888 new cases of the novel coronavirus, up from 44,358 a week ago (Covid Tracking Project). We've diagnosed 358,475 new cases in the last seven-days, the highest seven-day total yet.
We reported 919 new deaths today, up from 596 a week ago. Now, the last two days, while deaths were unusually low, I thought it might be due not to things suddenly getting much better, but due to delayed reporting from the July 4th weekend. Well, now after two extremely low days of deaths, we have a very high day of deaths. So this could just be the catch-up reporting. But we'll have a better idea by the end of the week whether deaths are actually starting to go up.
The smart folks behind the IHME projections -- who have been wrong before but definitely understand this better than I do -- think we're most likely to get a fairly gentle bump in deaths over the next couple weeks. If they turn out to be right, I'm guessing that's because of how much the latest spike in coronavirus cases seems to be concentrated among young people, who are harder to kill. Time will tell.
The usual graphs are attached.
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