The national COVID-19 plateau continues. As I’ve been saying for a few weeks now, COVID-19 spread has dropped significantly from its high during the winter holidays, but it has not fallen to the low levels we’ve previously seen this time of year due to a combination of lax precautions and the latest Omicron variant, XBB.1.5.
Nationally, official COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations continue to trend slowly downward, suggesting that we’re in a high plateau of consistent virus spread. Reported cases have only declined by about 18% in the last month, while new hospital admissions have declined by 28%.
Nationwide, COVID-19 spread appears to be in a plateau: not substantially increasing, but not substantially decreasing, either. Officially-reported cases dropped by only 1% this week compared to the week prior, while wastewater data shows that the coronavirus concentration in our sewage hasn’t changed significantly for the last month.
COVID-19 spread in the U.S. continues to decline—but the decline continues to get slower, following the trend that I wrote about last week. Official COVID-19 cases, hospital admissions, and wastewater surveillance all indicate decreased transmission, leading into potential plateaus.
The U.S. is now on week six of falling COVID-19 case numbers nationwide. New cases fell 38% from last week to this week, and are down 87% from one month ago. This is also the first week that the country has reported a daily new case average under 100,000 since early December.
New COVID-19 cases continue to drop in the U.S. as the country slowly comes down from its Omicron wave. This week, the country reported a total of 850,000 new cases, according to the CDC; it’s the first week under one million new cases have been reported since early December, though we are still seeing over 100,000 new cases a day.
COVID-19 cases continue to decline across the U.S. as the country comes out of its Omicron surge. Nationwide, the U.S. reported an average of 215,000 new cases a day last week—a drop of about 75% from the peak of the Omicron surge, when nearly 800,000 new cases were reported each day.
Nationwide, new COVID-19 case numbers have decreased for the third week in a row. The country reported an average of 378,000 new cases each day last week—about half the daily case number reported at the peak of the Omicron surge three weeks ago.
After several weeks of declines, cases now appear to be in a plateau. But the COVID Tracking Project cautions that these numbers may also be the aftershocks of President’s Day and the winter storm, which led to artificially low numbers last week and delayed reporting arriving this week. One thing is for certain, though: vaccinations are recovering from the storm. We had two record vaccination days Friday and yesterday.
The number of COVID-19 patients in U.S. hospitals is now the lowest it’s been since early November. About 7,000 new patients were admitted each day this week—while this is still a huge number, it’s a notable drop from the peak (18,000 per day) we saw earlier in the winter.