A dozen states, including Oregon, report declines of 25% or more in new COVID-19 cases, and more than 1,200 counties have shown the same. Experts believe the jump could be linked to the growing fear of the virus after it reached record highs, as well as the rising hope of being vaccinated soon.
Nationally, new cases decreased by 21% from the previous week, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, which reflects more than 3,000 provinces. Corresponding declines in hospitalization and deaths can take days or weeks to arrive, and the fight against the deadly virus is raging in many places at record levels.
New cases fell significantly in Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming, and each state recorded at least 30% fewer new cases. Each of the countries reported that by Tuesday they had vaccinated 8% or more of their adult population, placing them among the top 20 states in terms of the vaccination rate.
According to HHS, Alaska currently leads the states by almost 15%. It has also seen a 24% drop over the past few days with a new case.
Anxiety about the new strains of the virus from the UK, Brazil and South Africa is still high in Portland’s Multnomah County, Oregon, which has declined drastically by 43% in recent days.
“The concern is that everything can change,” said Kate Yeiser, spokeswoman for the Department of Health in Multnomah County.
Health officials, data modeling experts and epidemiologists say it’s too early to see a bump in the explosion of vaccines that began in health care in late December and spread to many states to include older Americans.
Instead, they said, it is likely that the factors involved are behavior-driven, and that people will return home after the holidays or respond to news that hospital beds are running out in places like Los Angeles. Others find the intention to wear masks and physically distance themselves with the prospect that a vaccine may become more immediate.
A single reason is difficult to determine, said Adriane Casalotti, head of government and public affairs at the National Association of County and City Health Officials. She said it could be due in part to people hoping to avoid the new, more contagious variant of the virus, which experts say also appears to be more deadly.
She also said that so many people got sick in the last boom that more people might take precaution: “There’s a greater chance you know someone who had it,” Casalotti said.
Eva Lee, a mathematics and engineering professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is working on models that predict COVID-19 patterns. She said in an email that the decline reflects the natural course of the virus as it infects a social web of people, depletes the group, dies and then emerges in new groups.
She also said the national trend, with even steeper declines in California, also reflects state restrictions, which include closing indoor dining rooms and an evening clock at 10 p.m. in hard-hit regions. She said the measures take several weeks to appear in new case data.
“It’s currently a very unstable equilibrium,” Lee wrote in the email. “So any premature celebration could lead to a further increase, as we have seen time and time again in the US.”
Four counties in California were one of the five largest U.S. provinces that fell the strongest, including Los Angeles County, where new cases dropped by nearly 40% in the week ending Jan. 25, compared to the previous week.
Dr. Karin Michels, chair of epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, said the lower numbers in LA after the virus infected 1 in 8 residents of the country probably reflect what happened after the uprising in New York City: people became very scared and changed their behavior.
“People are starting to understand that we really need to work in LA, so that helps,” she said. ‘The great fear [now] is ‘Is it really going in this direction, is it going flat, or where is it going?’ We have to go further down because it’s really high. ”
Michels said that the immunity of herds would not explain the declines because we are not close to about 70% of the population who had the disease or were vaccinated. She said the declines could also reflect a decline in testing as Dodger Stadium was converted from a mass test site to a mass vaccination center.
California Department of Public Health officials have acknowledged that tests have declined, but the overall rate of positive COVID-19 tests is declining, suggesting the change is real.
Yet experts are not yet prepared to say that the vaccines are the case.
“Most people in public health do not think that we will see the benefit of the vaccine until a few months from now,” said Dr. Marcus Plescia, medical chief of the Association of Civil Servants and Territorial Health, said.
The number of deaths remains high weeks after high cases, as the virus invariably attacks the heart, kidneys, lungs and nervous system. Many patients remain unconscious for weeks and in a ventilator while doctors are looking for signs of improvement.
The mortality rate dropped by only 5% in the data posted Wednesday, reflecting 21,790 patients who died from the virus on January 19-25.
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(Shoshana Dubnow contributed to this report.)
Kaiser Health News is a national health policy news service. This is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.