Inchin' up! Cases are inching up for the first time in a longgg time. BA.2????? Naughty, naughty. First day of the new full-reporting week is in the books and here are the numbers:
14-day changes
-1% Cases. You know they're inching up when Cases are only -1.
-26% Hospitalizations. Still the chalk. C-H interval.
-40% Deaths. Chalk. Death interval.
7-day daily averages
28,693 Cases. UP from 27,573 March 29 through April 4. It doesn't look that bad on the graph but 1.1k more per day?--that's UP! Wave, Quasis? No. Ripple. But it's early! Maybe the Quasis will be right.
15,552 Hospitalizations. Down from 15,692. No, 40/day isn't DOWN, it's down.
602 Deaths. Down from 633. Given the baseline that's still a decent drop. I still think we'll descend to the second deepest trough of the U.S. epidemic, that on July 5, 2020, 519, but I don't think we're going to get to the all-time trough of 218 on July 12, 2021.
Last time I read about it BA.2 accounted for more than 75% of U.S. Cases. It's ability to evade vaccines and increased transmissiblility is starting to show up now. We don't know how severe BA.2 is going to be. To state the obvious, H's and D's are not going to continue to fall when C's are rising. Duh. But whether it will be another wave of H's and D's we don't know and I rather doubt (not that my doubts are worth a shit).
We're going to keep an eye on this now.
