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COVID-19 Cases Inching Up

The next four days will be telling.

We bottomed out at around 49,000 COVID-19 cases a day. Lately, however, the case rate has started to tick up. On Thursday there were not quite 61,000 cases, with each day during the last few days showing a slight increase. See this website for the coronavirus case counts.

We are now routinely vaccinating over 2 million people a day and the Biden administration felt comfortable enough to share doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine (which is not yet approved for use in the U.S.) with other countries. 

Case counts can vary from day to day. Another four days will either verify the trend upward or show that it was just a blip on the chart. However, infectious disease experts continue to predict a rise in cases as the new variants of the virus spread more broadly and as states are prematurely opening up, and in some cases even removing the mask mandate. 

Florida will be particularly interesting to watch because of all the spring break activities going on in that state. 

Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.