AZ Pandemic Numbers for the Week Ending August 21—No Flattening After All

 

Here is the pandemic numbers summary for the week just ended:

Despite my optimism that new cases might be leveling off last week, we are back to increases both at the state level and the Maricopa County level. The increases are small but not as small as last week. We can see that that the upward trend is pretty consistent can be seen in the graph of state-level cases over the last two months:

The new case rate is six times what it was two months ago.  At least the line doesn't look exponential over the last month.  

The only bright side is that positive test percentage is dropping slightly.  Otherwise, the COVID-19 hospital bed percentage increased by a little more than it did last week.  A bit over one-fifth of beds are occupied by people who wouldn't be there had they taken the vaccine.

I have dropped the line in the summary table for the Delta variant because it is making up nearly all of the cases now.  It will continue to do so until some new variant comes along.

Speaking of vaccine, here is this week's accelerometer:


It's showing less acceleration than grandma on the on-ramp. It's the third straight week of only fractional gains. New vaccinations are looking like they're over in Arizona unless employer mandates and/or full approval (expected tomorrow for Pfizer) make some kind of difference.

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