U.S. Covid cases are falling since the last peak, but Delta continues to rise in some states

Covid case counts in the United States show signs of loosening their most recent highs, but remain high as the country enters a fall-back-to-school fall season and colder weather.

The average seven-day Covid case daily is about 144,300 as of Sept. 12, according to data collected by Johns Hopkins University. That figure has dropped 12% over the past week and 14% from the most recent case peak on Sept. 1, when the country reported an average of about 167,600 cases a day.

“This is good news,” Dr. Arturo Casadevall, president of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It could represent that we have reached a peak and that we are now descending.”

The United States has seen a handful of high points in the event of a countdown during the pandemic. The average number of daily cases exceeded approximately 32,000 in April 2020 before being subsidized and again reached a maximum of 67,000 per day in July 2020. The pace of new cases fell after Labor Day 2020 before reaching a record high of 251,000 cases a day in January. There was a sharp drop after the holidays, with another jump to about 71,000 cases a day last April.

“All epidemics go through cycles and eventually decrease, and that happens when you have enough resilient people,” said Casadevall, who explained that the combination of vaccinations and a high number of infections this summer could help the country to turn the corner.

But, he warned, the virus has been unpredictable. “I would only care to declare anything except a certain degree of optimism with the fact that the numbers are going down,” he added.

There are also some promising signs in Covid hospitalization and mortality cases, which tend to delay the counting of cases a couple of weeks or more, as it takes time to become infected with the virus and then get sick enough to need it. urgent attention.

Currently, about 100,600 Americans are hospitalized with Covid-19, according to an average of seven days of data from the Department of Health and Human Services, 2% less than a week ago. Although current hospitalizations had not exceeded 100,000 people since January before again exceeding that level in late August, the pace of new Covid patients entering the hospital is now slowing. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show a 6.8% drop in the seven-day average of hospital admissions for the week ending Sept. 10 compared to the previous week.

However, the daily death toll continues to rise. The country reports an average of more than 1,600 coveted deaths per day over the past week, according to Hopkins data, a maximum of six months. Daily deaths rose 4% last week, however, a more modest increase than the 26% weekly change reported two weeks ago.

Still, the United States is heading into the fall season, with students back in school and a colder climate approaching, driving people inland where the virus spreads more easily. .

“I think we’re likely to get to the top, but I think the only thing we need to see before we know it’s true is the look of the data after the whole country has started the school season,” Dr. . Bruce Farber, head of infectious diseases at Northwell Health in New York. With the start of the school year in the Northeast, it could be weeks before possible classroom-related outbreaks are seen.

The pace of new infections is now falling in some of the states that saw the earliest impact of the delta variant last summer.

In Missouri, which experienced an increase in cases in early July, the number of cases fell 10% last week to an average of about 2,100 a day, a drop of 29% from the last peak of early August. Hospital admissions have been falling for weeks and the state’s daily death toll shows signs of flattening. Missouri reports an average of 32 deaths daily, according to Hopkins data.

Trends are similar to Arkansas and Louisiana, both at the top or near the state ranking for the population-adjusted case count over the summer, but now rank 19th and 21st, respectively. Arkansas reports 1,600 average daily cases compared to the recent high of 2,351 daily on Aug. 7, with Louisiana at 2,239 average daily cases as of Sept. 12, below the pandemic high of 5,839 on Aug. 13.

According to the CDC, hospital admissions are falling in both states, although neither state has yet experienced a sustained decline in daily deaths.

Infection levels have dropped even in Florida, where hospitals have been invaded this summer, as the state has suffered one of the worst outbreaks in the United States, Florida, which failed to report daily cases in May. , said it had 100,249 new infections during the seven-day period ending Friday, compared to 129,202 the previous week and 151,760 the previous week. The state reported 2,448 new deaths last week, however, it is the highest weekly pandemic total.

In other parts of the country, the delta variant is still being imposed.

Case counts in West Virginia reached record levels, according to Hopkins data, reaching a daily average of about 1,800 a day. Dr. Clay Marsh, the state’s Covid Tsar and vice president and executive dean of health sciences at the University of West Virginia, said the latest increase has been more extreme and has passed more quickly than any of the previous waves.

“We are very concerned to get out of this particular part of the pandemic because our hospital systems and ICUs have been challenged in a more severe way than before,” he said.

There are 852 West Virginians in a hospital with Covid-19 as of Monday, Marsh said, until 52 on July 5. and in fans, from 6 to 162.

Most Covid patients in critical care in their hospital system are not vaccinated and are also younger than in earlier stages of the pandemic, Marsh said. Although West Virginia was one of the first national leaders in vaccinations, the rate of vaccinations has fallen since then and 39.9% of the state’s fully vaccinated population is equal to the last in the country, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While Marsh is especially concerned about protecting the state’s under-12 population that is not yet eligible for a shot, he said 51 of 55 county school districts and many of the state’s universities have adopted a mask policy. He hopes a recent increase in vaccinations, combined with what is likely to be a high level of immunity among the population from past infections, will help the state avoid unmanageable pressures on the hospital system.

Some projections show that hospitalizations in West Virginia will continue to rise to new heights in the coming weeks, said Dr. Kathryn Moffett, an infectious disease specialist at WVU Medicine.

“It’s amazing,” he said. “We’re trying to prepare, but I don’t know how you can prepare to have more fans and more space.”

Kentucky also sets records. Gov. Andy Beshear said in a statement on Sept. 7 that the state reported a record number of new cases in one week, from Aug. 30 to Sept. 5, with 30,680 cases.

“We continue to see more cases than is safe by any means,” Beshear said in the statement. “The bad news is that we had the worst week last week. Our hospitals are still being pushed. If we have a bad week, we can quickly run out of ICU beds.”

And the count of cases in Tennessee, which reports the highest number of daily new cases per capita over the past week, has been steadily rising since July. Tennessee reported an average of more than 7,600 cases a day over the past week, according to Hopkins, compared to a pandemic peak of 9,627 in December.

Still, infectious disease experts say the country would be in a much worse state without access to Covid vaccines. About 54 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated, according to CDC data, although the current rate of daily intakes is well below record levels since mid-April.

“If we hadn’t had the vaccine, you would have seen much bigger cases and a much higher mortality,” Hopkins doctor Casadevall said. “It is very clear that people who have the vaccine can get it [Covid], but it is also clear that the likelihood of them suffering from serious illness, or having to go to the hospital or dying, is much lower than if they had not been vaccinated. Therefore, the vaccine, in the background, saves tens of thousands of lives. “