This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2020-8-22, 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 46,295 new cases of the novel coronavirus, down from 56,603 a week ago (Covid Tracking Project). The graph continues its happy decline.
We reported 1024 deaths today, down from 1219 a week ago. If you follow the seven-day rolling average, we averaged 987 deaths per day over the last seven days. So after 25 days with the rolling average deaths hovering between 1000 and 1200, we've finally broken that awful streak, and it's broken in the right direction.
Given that deaths follow cases on a lag, unless something is very wrong with the statistics the next three or four weeks should see steadily declining deaths. If cases keep declining, deaths should keep following them. The only way that should turn around is if cases start rising again, and then we would expect to see deaths start rising three or four weeks later. If that pattern doesn't hold, then that's a pretty good clue that something is off.
Hospitalizations are also falling, and at a pretty quick clip, ever since they peaked on July 23. So tomorrow, unless something drastic happens, we'll be looking at a month of falling hospitalizations.
The usual graphs are attached, plus one that on hospitalizations that I grabbed from the Covid Tracking Project.
This writing on this page is released under the CC0 1.0 license, as are the four blue dot-and-line graphs, which I made. The graph of current hospitalizations is from The Covid Tracking Project, which released its work under the CC BY 4.0 license.