A dozen states, including Oregon, are reporting drops of 25% or more in new cases of COVID-19 and more than 1,200 counties have seen the same, federal data released on Wednesday show. Experts say the drop may be related to the growing fear of the virus after it reached record levels, as well as growing hopes of being vaccinated soon.
Nationally, new cases fell 21% from the previous week, according to data from the Department of Health and Human Services, reflecting just over 3,000 counties. Corresponding declines in hospitalization and death can take days or weeks to arrive, and the battle against the deadly virus continues at record levels in many places.
New cases dropped significantly in Oregon, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming, with each state registering at least 30% fewer new cases. Each of these states reported having vaccinated 8% or more of its adult population by Tuesday, placing them among the top 20 states in terms of vaccination rates.
Alaska currently leads the states, with almost 15%, according to HHS. It also registered a drop of new cases of 24% in the last days.
Anxiety about new strains of the virus in the UK, Brazil and South Africa remains high in Portland, Oregon’s Multnomah County, which has seen a dramatic 43% decline in new cases in recent days.
“The concern is that everything can change,” said Kate Yeiser, a spokeswoman for the Multnomah County Health Department.
Health officials, data modeling experts and epidemiologists say it is too early to see an increase in vaccine launch that started with health professionals in late December and, in many states, has now included older Americans.
Instead, they said, the factors involved are most likely driven by behavior, with people returning home after a vacation or reacting to news of hospital beds in places like Los Angeles. Others are discovering the decision to wear masks and distance themselves physically with the prospect of a vaccine becoming more immediate.
It is difficult to identify a single reason, said Adriane Casalotti, head of government and public relations at the National Association of Municipal and Municipal Health Officials. She said this may be partly due to people who want to avoid the most contagious new variants of the virus, which some experts say also appear to be more lethal.
She also said that so many people fell ill in the last wave that more people may be taking precautions: “There is a better chance that you will meet someone who has had it,” said Casalotti.
Eva Lee, a mathematics and engineering professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, works on models that predict COVID-19 standards. She said in an e-mail that the decline reflects the natural course of the virus as it infects a social network of people, depletes that cluster, dies and then appears in new groups.
She also said that the national trend, with even more pronounced declines in California, also reflects restrictions in that state, which included the closing of in-house restaurants and a 10 pm curfew in the most affected regions. She said that these measures take a few weeks to appear in new case data.
“It’s a very unstable balance at the moment,” Lee wrote in the email. “Therefore, any premature celebration would lead to another peak, as we have seen several times in the United States.”
Four counties in California were among the top five counties in the United States with the highest case declines, including Los Angeles County, where new cases dropped nearly 40% in the week ending January 25, compared to the previous week.
Dr. Karin Michels, director of epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, said the lower numbers in Los Angeles after the virus infected 1 in 8 county residents probably reflect what happened after the rise of New York City. York: people were very scared and changed their behavior.
“People are starting to understand that we really need to pull ourselves together in LA, so it helps,” she said. “The great fear [now] is ‘Are you really going in that direction, are you stagnating or where are you going?’ We need to go down further, because it is very high ”.
Michels said that collective immunity would not explain the declines, as we are nowhere near the level of 70% of the population that has had the disease or been vaccinated. She said the falls could also reflect a drop in testing, as Dodger Stadium was converted from a mass test site to a mass vaccination center.
California Department of Public Health officials acknowledged that tests have fallen, but overall rates of positive COVID-19 tests are falling, suggesting that the change is real.
Even so, experts are not yet ready to say that vaccines are reducing cases.
“Most people in public health don’t think we will see the benefits of the vaccine until a few months from now,” said Dr. Marcus Plescia, medical director of the Association of Territorial and State Health Officers.
The number of deaths remains high weeks after high case rates, as the virus attacks the heart, kidneys, lungs and nervous system in a variable way. Many patients remain unconscious and on the ventilator for weeks while doctors look for signs of improvement.
The death rate fell just 5% in the data published on Wednesday, reflecting 21,790 patients who died of the virus from January 19 to 25.
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(Shoshana Dubnow contributed to this report.)
Kaiser Health News is a national health policy news service. It is an independent editorial program by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.