COVID NUMBERS ALL OVER THE MAP

After weeks of U.S. COVID case numbers falling, they now appear to have leveled off. The daily death toll has not declined, however, and rose 1 percent over the last week. 
Such are the figures from Johns Hopkins University, reported on 10 November by CNBC. Since 13 September (thought to be the peak of the latest wave of Delta variant cases) new case counts have fallen by 57 percent.
The sharpest reductions have been in the South, where hospitalizations and deaths are also down, in contrast to spikes seen this summer (attributed to the Delta variant) in Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia.
TRENDPOST: But wait! Isn’t the South the U.S. region with some of the lowest rates of vaccination compliance? See “VAX COUNT IN U.S. AND BEYOND” (19 Jan 2021).
CNBC notes that Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana each have less than 48 percent of their populations vaxxed, putting them among the bottom ten states in vax rates. 
The Midwest, on the other hand, shows a 25 percent increase in cases, but with no significant rise in hospitalizations; the most new cases have been in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Nebraska. 
In the Northeast, new cases are up by 18 percent and hospitalizations are down by 9 percent. The West shows a 4 percent increase in new cases, driven by increases of 15 percent or more in Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, but hospitalizations have remained flat. 
CNBC reports that in Colorado “the ERs are packed” and one hospital was “beyond capacity,” but then attributes that to COVID and “all the reasons people go to hospitals.” About 85 percent of Colorado’s staffed ICU beds are being utilized, with about 36 percent occupied by COVID patients.
TRENDPOST: If it seems as if these numbers and observations are, literally and figuratively, “all over the map,” and not easily conducive to finding logical patterns or conclusions, that’s really nothing new in the way COVID information is reported; see “FAUCI THE FEARMONGER” (7 Jul 2020) and “THIS WEEK IN FEAR & ANXIETY” (14 Jul 2021).