One Million COVID Cases

I’ve been seeing news that the US COVID cases counts reached the one million threshold for 1/3/2022, so I want to do a very quick post about this level.

The data comes from John Hopkins University; I imagine the CDC will come out with their data tomorrow – if they are caught up. Image 1 on the left below shows a table of case counts for the states and at the bottom you can see the 1 million mark. On the right is Image 2 showing how the daily case counts have been trending since the first appearance of the virus. I’ve marked off certain thresholds and you can see that at end of December and in January we’ve been hitting blockbuster levels. The counts are just skyrocketing.

One thing we got to keep in mind though is that we just got off of the New Year’s weekend. New Year’s Eve was last Friday so many states did not provide their data for three days and possibly even Monday. The 1 million number is a catch-up number, so let’s not be fooled by that.

I’ve highlighted in Image 3 below the 1 million total and highlighted those zeroes that came in for 12/31/2021, 1/1/2022, and 1/2/2022. Logically, 1/3/2022 should represent a catch-up day.

However, let’s not kid ourselves. On 1/1/2022 and 1/2/2022, we had maybe between 11-15 states reporting in the numbers over the holiday weekend and yet the count reached over 100,000. If you look at the last week of December (12/27 – 31), the daily counts were reaching close to half a million. The weekend counts, with just 11 – 15 states reporting, reached over 100K.

The days before Christmas (12/22 – 24), we were in the 200K level.

I would not be surprised if we are consistently reaching 1 million count levels by next week or even the end of this week. The Omicron surge is exponential, way more exponential than Delta.

Fortunately, the news is the Omicron appears to cause a not as severe illness. As always, the question will be how swamped the hospitals will be.