This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2020-9-1, 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 42,401 new cases of the novel coronavirus, up from 36,989 a week ago (Covid Tracking Project). If you look at the seven-day rolling average, we've gone basically nowhere the past week: we've stayed between 40,000 and 42,000 every day for eight days.
Things are a little better when it comes to deaths. We reported 1022 deaths today, down from 1147 a week ago. And if you follow that seven-day rolling average over the last eight days, it's been steady downward movement. Over the last seven days, we've averaged 896 deaths a day, down from 965 in the seven days before that, down from 1046 before that.
Something weird might be about to happen to the statistics here. The CDC, until now, recommended testing people who do not have symptoms but have been in contact with covid patients. However, they've now for some reason changed that recommendation, and they're saying to stick to just testing the contacts with symptoms.
Now, the federal government mostly isn't running the show here, so I'm not sure if the CDC's change of mind here will change much on the ground. I'm not sure how that works. But if the guidelines are followed, we might expect to see less people tested, and therefore less new cases recorded, which would look like things getting better. On the other hand, if we stop testing asymptomatic people and just test sick people, we'd expect the positivity rate to climb, making things look worse.
But we haven't seen those mixed signals yet. If we do, the thing to watch would be hospitalizations, because the hospitalization numbers wouldn't be affected by changing in policy towards people without symptoms. This week, the hospitalizations have dropped from around 39k to around 35k. And if the data goes sideways, I'll add a graph for those.
This page is released under the CC0 1.0 license.