by Calculated Risk on 12/18/2020 08:05:00 PM

Note: The week-over-week growth in positive cases has slowed.  Hopefully that continues.

I'm looking forward to not posting this data in a few months. Please stay healthy!

The US is now averaging well over 1 million tests per day. Based on the experience of other countries, for adequate test-and-trace (and isolation) to reduce infections, the percent positive needs to be under 5% (probably close to 1%), so the US has far too many daily cases - and percent positive - to do effective test-and-trace.

There were 1,039,120 test results reported over the last 24 hours.

There were 228,825 positive tests.

Over 45,000 US deaths have been reported so far in December. See the graph on US Daily Deaths here.

Click on graph for larger image.

This data is from the COVID Tracking Project.

The percent positive over the last 24 hours was 22.0% (red line is 7 day average).  The percent positive is calculated by dividing positive results by the sum of negative and positive results (I don't include pending).

And check out COVID Act Now to see how each state is doing. (updated link to new site)

The second graph shows the 7 day average of positive tests reported and daily hospitalizations.

• Record Hospitalizations (Over 114,000)

• Record 7 Day Average Deaths