This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2020-9-28, 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 36,741 new cases of the novel coronavirus, down from 39,467 a week ago (Covid Tracking Project). It's been a few days since I ran the numbers last, so it might be worth checking the week-to-week numbers. The last seven days have averaged 43,875 cases per day, compared to 41,116 on average the week before. But the number of tests has also been rising. We had 6.5 million tests total over the last seven days, up from 6.0 million the week before. When you look at the test positivity rate lately, it's more or less flat, hanging out around 5%.
We reported 260 deaths today, down from 287 a week ago. If you follow the seven-day rolling average, it's at 744. It's been up and down a bit lately, but just for comparison it was also at 744 on September 10th, for a total of zero net movement over the past 18 days.
The country is reporting 29,539 hospitalizations currently, up from 28,755 a week ago. Hospitalizations are basically flat lately, after a long stretch of falling.
So everything's hanging in limbo at the moment, waiting to go up or down.
The usual graphs are attached, plus one that shows testing and positivity rates (from Johns Hopkins) and one that shows hospitalizations (from Covid Tracking Project).
The writing on this page is released under the CC0 1.0 license. The four graphs full of blue dots are likewise my creation, and therefore released under the same. The graphs of hospitalizations, cases, and deaths were produced as part of The Covid Tracking Project, which released its work under the CC-BY-4.0 license. The positivity graph is from JHU.