New coronavirus cases have continued to plummet over the past week – advances that could help the United States find a faster and safer way out of the pandemic if they keep up.
The whole picture: Getting the virus spread under control is the key to saving lives and reopening schools and businesses. And the tools to achieve this – masks, social distancing, and vaccines – are also the most effective weapons against more contagious variants that could threaten US progress.
By numbers: On average, 108,000 Americans have been diagnosed with COVID-19 infections every day in the last week.
- This is a 24% decrease from the previous week.
- Hospitalizations also fell last week by about 8% and deaths fell by 3%. The virus still kills about 3,000 Americans a day.
Between the lines: 108,000 new cases and 3,000 deaths a day are still a very bad situation and should not be considered a sustainable level of infection.
- But after the terrible winter outbreak that the US has experienced, the only way to have a small number of cases is to keep going up week after week. And that’s what happens.
- At the national level, average daily cases fell by two figures for four weeks in a row. Cumulatively, they fell by about 55% during this time.
- It has been three weeks since even a single condition reported an increase in average daily infections.
This is real progress.
What’s next: Experts have warned that new, more contagious variants of COVID-19 are gaining ground in the United States and are likely to soon become the dominant strain here. This means that every infected person is more likely to spread the virus.
- The best way to avoid increasing the number of cases of these variants is to increase vaccinations, close masks and social distance – including double masks when necessary – and further reduce the number of infected people.
Every week, Axios monitors the change of new infections in each condition. We use an average of seven days to minimize the effects of daily discrepancies in reporting states.