by Calculated Risk on 12/31/2020 06:51:00 PM

Wishing everyone a safe, healthy and Happy New Year!

Note: Expect a dip in the data over the holidays. The week-over-week growth in positive cases slowed prior to the holidays.  Hopefully that continues after the holidays.

I'm looking forward to not posting this data in a few months.

The US is now averaging close to 2 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 1,719,181 test results reported over the last 24 hours.

There were 221,444 positive tests.

Over 77,000 US deaths were reported in December, far surpassing April as the deadliest month. 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 12.9% (red line is 7 day average).  The percent positive is calculated by dividing positive results by total tests (including 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