Second Wave Likely Past Peak

I probably could have written this a week ago, but I wanted to give the numbers more time to come in. I think at this point that I'm comfortable stating that the DC area is in the late stages of its second wave of infections. This is in contrast to what I wrote back in November, when I wrote that the region was in the "early stages" of a second wave.

This 2nd wave appears to have had a double-peak, one in early December 2020, and one in mid-January 2021. The chart below is a 7-day moving average of new cases, which helps eliminate some of the day-to-day noise of the data. If you want to go by strictly the seven-day average, then the 2nd wave peaked on 17 January 2021.

As you can see, there has been a sustained trend towards lower levels in new case counts since mid-January (I'll note the infamous 17 January datum, with over 4,000 new cases. Maybe a high-water mark for the region for the entire COVID outbreak?) The region is now on par with that of November of last year; I'll note that in absolute terms, the new case count for 8 February was 796 cases, which is on-par with about the first week of November 2020. We'll see how much lower that figure gets.

What remains unclear is when the wave will end, and new cases will flat-line, and what that new flat-line actually is. This is important because after the first wave, new cases then flat-lined on the order of about 500 per day from mid-June all the way to mid-October. But should the new baseline be closer to something more like 1,000 cases a day, that's hardly a trivial difference.