The number of new positive SARS-CoV-2 cases can indicate the degree to which the virus is transmitted in a population. If public health officials observe an increase in the number of new cases they may ask, at a federal or state level, to increase test production to measure the degree to which the virus has spread and increase restrictions to prevent spread of the infectious agent. The US Outpatient Influenza-like illness Surveillance network (ILINet) has reported on 2020-12-26 that 1.6% of patient visits have influenza-like illness compared to a national baseline of 2.6%. The number of new COVID-19 cases in the US as reported by the JHU CSSE group as of 2021-01-05 was 1.434M.

A plot of the current number of new incident confirmed positive COVID-19 cases in the US over time using data from the JHU CSSE group can be found here and the raw data used to generate this plot can be found here.

Data sources and more information:

• The Atlantic’s COVIDtracking project
• Data from John Hopkins University CSSEE COVID-19 Dataset
• The COVID-19 ForecastHub
• CDC’s US COVID19 Cases and Deaths by State over time
• The Latest Map and Case count by the NY Times

What will be the number of new incident confirmed positive COVID-19 cases in the US beginning on 2021-01-24 and ending on 2021-01-30 (inclusive)?

This question will resolve as the number of new confirmed cases beginning on 2021-01-24 and ending on 2021-01-30 (inclusive) recorded in the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) CSSE Github data repository. This file records the daily number of cases by county. From this file cases are summed across all counties and aggregated by week to generate the number of new cases per week. The report will be accessed one week after the end of the month (2021-02-06).