- by New Deal democrat
Confirmed cases nationwide (dotted line below) declined to 121,700, still within their recent 120-130,000 range. Deaths (solid line) are also steady at 431, within their recent 400-450 range as well:
Hospitalizations have plateaued in the past 10 days reported in the 45-47,000 range, and as of July 30 were 46,100. A commenter at Seeking Alpha who works in a hospital wrote to me that the big increase in the past several months has been people showing up with unrelated issues testing positive for COVID, I.e., “patients with COVID:”
Biobot has not updated since one week ago, showing as of then a 10% drop in COVID virus in wastewater, consistent with a “real” case count of about 360,000.
The CDC updated its variant tracker yesterday, showing BA.4&5 making up 97% of all cases. They also included a new subvariant, BA.4.6, in their analysis, indicating it constituted 4% of all cases, or 1/3rd of the BA.4 total:
It is primarily a factor in the northern Great Plains, where it makes up 9% of all cases.
But it has not been particularly growing in the past month, nor does it seem to be replacing BA.5. Similarly, while a few cases of BA.2.75 are showing up in most States, they are not showing up in the CDC data at all. I have not seen any medical commentary on either subvariant in the past week.
Regionally there has been a small decline of confirmed cases in the West, while the other three regions are steady:
In fact, the only noteworthy changes in any State are that NY and NJ both show small declines:
Unless a new variant shows up imminently, I suspect we are entering a period of decline in cases and deaths.
