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At first glance, the pandemic situation in the United States appears to be very stable.Average number of new confirmed cases coronavirus The daily case count has barely budged for weeks, hovering between 95,000 and 115,000 a day in June.
A closer look reveals that as public testing sites run by state and local governments are sifted through, more states have also stopped providing daily data updates, adding to the ambiguity of the virus situation across the country.
New federal estimates on Tuesday showed the fast-spreading Omicron A sub-variant known as BA.5 has become dominant in new coronavirus cases. BA.5 accounted for about 54% of new U.S. cases for the week ended Saturday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Just a week ago, the agency’s estimates put BA.5 and BA.4 (another omicron sub-variant) together to dominate, a trend predicted by experts. The new statistics, released Tuesday morning, are based on models and can be revised as more data becomes available.
BA.4 and BA.5 are able to evade some antibodies produced after coronavirus vaccination and infection, including infection by some other versions of omicron. But researchers in South Africa recently reported that spring tides driven by BA.4 and BA.5 did not appear to cause more severe disease than the country’s first omicron wave.
The decline in public testing in the U.S. means that laboratory-based PCR testing capacity in July will be half what it was in March, according to recent estimates from research and consulting firm Health Catalysts Group. Even some testing companies announced layoffs and closures last week.
The vast majority of positive results from popular home testing kits are not included in official data, and not everyone who has been infected is known or tested. Many Americans don’t seem to be focusing on daily case counts — which, to be sure, have been an underestimation of total infections — as a measure of the nation’s health in the pandemic. But other Americans with risk factors say they feel neglected and abandoned as their governments and neighbors seek to return to normal.
Some scientists estimate that the current wave of cases is the second largest in the pandemic.
“My favorite quote from someone at the CDC is ‘You don’t need to count the raindrops to know how hard it’s raining,'” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said at a conference in Aspen, Colorado, in late June. “So we can tell how well we’re doing across the country by the 500,000 to 1 million PCRs we’re doing every day.”
The CDC’s monitoring of community risk levels showed that, in its latest update, 33 percent of the U.S. population lived in high-risk counties in much of the Northeast. In May, the map changed dramatically, with the Northeast including most of the high-risk counties. The CDC recommends wearing masks indoors in public places under such a designation.
In much of the Northeast, cases continued to decline throughout June, according to the New York Times database. In the South, cases in many states have doubled or tripled at the same time. As of Sunday, the U.S. was reporting more than 113,000 new coronavirus cases a day.
“It doesn’t really reflect the total amount of virus circulating in the community,” said Amesh Adalia, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. He said his “back of the envelope” It is estimated that there are about 1 million cases per day.
Changes in the trajectory of the virus show up more slowly because states report less frequently. Nearly every state has reported five or more days of new coronavirus cases, hospitalizations and deaths a week in 2020 and 2021, but 23 states now release new data only once a week, according to the Times tracker.
California, which used to update its cumulative cases and deaths every weekday, now only updates it twice a week. In Florida, case and death data are released every two weeks. Just last week, more public testing sites in Alaska, Colorado and Rhode Island closed. Iowa will close many sites next weekend.
Recent virus data has fluctuated around holidays like Memorial Day and Juneteenth, during which many states routinely pause reporting and then start tracking again, a trend that is sure to continue this week after the July 4 holiday weekend. continue.
“Following daily test counts is not as instructive as it used to be,” Adalja said, noting a strong link between past cases and hospitalizations.
He added that today’s numbers should not be viewed as a check on the daily standings or scores of sports teams.
“I think testing is playing a different role,” he said. “Even though the test is in different stages, it’s always underestimated.”
Adjala said he has come to rely on hospitalizations as a percentage of his capacity to get a localized understanding of how the virus is developing. He also checked the CDC’s community-level tracker, which includes the number of new admissions and how many beds are used. Instead of tracking the “rise and fall of cases”, he urged a shift in focus to serious illnesses.
Hospitalizations rose slightly throughout June, but remained low. On average, more than 33,000 people in U.S. hospitals are infected with the coronavirus every day, and fewer than 4,000 are in intensive care. The number of new deaths per day remains below 400, down from the country’s peak of more than 3,300 deaths per day in January 2021.
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