This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2020-8-12, 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 55,742 new cases of the novel coronavirus, up from 52,265 a week ago (Covid Tracking Project). That's two days in a row with "up" cases. And while two days is just two days, that's something to watch.
We reported 1485 deaths today, which is very high, higher than any time in the past three months except for that one crazy day that had 2500 due to a change in how New Jersey (was it New Jersey?) defined its death count. So I suppose we'll have to wait and see whether it means anything. Over all, the last fourteen days have had some up days for deaths, and some down days for deaths, but no real significant motion in any direction.
One thing that seems to be changing lately is that right now we seem to be seem a decrease in the number of people tested. So does that account for the recent decrease in cases? Well, if it did we might expect the positive test rate to be increasing, but it isn't, at least not nationwide. I'm not quite sure what this means. We'll have to wait and see if tests level off and see where things are going then.
So basically, the numbers are wiggling around a bit in weird ways, so it's hard to say whether things are getting better or worse right this moment. But we'll know more as time passes. After all, at the end of the day, the hospitals will either get fuller with Covid patients, or they'll get emptier.
Week to week, or month to month, we can see what's happening. Individual days are a little harder to make judgments about.
The usual graphs are attached, plus one from Johns Hopkin's University that shows the testing situation.
This page is released under the CC0 1.0 license, except for the graph about testing, which belongs to Johns Hopkins University.