US coronavirus deaths might be peaking after a record surge in cases, a new analysis says

• The US has seen a second surge in coronavirus cases in the last month, with subsequent hospitalizations and deaths.
• Now, while some southern states continue to see infection spikes, new cases in California and Arizona appear to have peaked, according to a new analysis.
• The analysis suggests that new hospitalizations are also slowly declining, and daily deaths from this second surge may have peaked too.
• "We can't be sure the dip in the trend will be sustained, but the numbers are encouraging," the author said.

Over the last week, the US has added an average of 62,200 new coronavirus cases per day to its already staggering infection total, which passed 3.5 million cases on Thursday. That tally was bumped up on Sunday by Florida, which reported the highest single-day coronavirus surge in a state ever recorded: 15,300 cases.

The unprecedented spike in COVID-19 cases began in mid-June, hitting southern states the hardest. In Texas, one of the worst-affected, doctors and experts have spent a month warning of a spiraling public-health crisis as both COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths climbed.

But preliminary data suggest the US may be coming out the other side of this devastating second surge, according to a new analysis by Pantheon Macroeconomics, a UK-based research consultancy group.

Even though daily cases numbers remain high, preliminary trends show the 7-day average of new hospitalizations is starting to fall, and the 7-day average of deaths per day is also slightly decreasing.

"We can't be sure the dip in the trend will be sustained, but the numbers are encouraging," Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon and author of the analysis, wrote on Thursday.

New hospitalizations and deaths may be slowly declining

Experts know what to expect in the wake of an infection surge: A few weeks after cases rise, hospitalizations creep up. Then come deaths, which lag a few weeks behind.

While hospitalizations started to increase day-over-day in early July, Shepherdson's analysis suggests "the trend in daily hospitalizations is now falling" across the US (with the exception of Florida, which seems to be seeing an uptick after only recently starting to report daily new hospitalizations).

"The downshift is clear," he wrote.

On Wednesday, half of the CDC-approved forecasts predicted stable numbers or slight declines in the number of new hospitalizations per day over the next month.

That could, in part, be explained by the fact that cases are rising fast among younger Americans, who are less likely to be hospitalized with severe COVID-19 cases than people older than 65.

"We're all speculating that after Memorial Day, it was really the younger people who perhaps reengaged with society too soon and without the proper precautions," Dr. Howard Koh, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, previously told Business Insider.

The Pantheon analysis suggests daily deaths may be decreasing too. "The 7-day average number of deaths per day fell slightly again" on Wednesday, according to Shepherdson, driven by declines in reported deaths in New Jersey and South Carolina.

His analysis reiterates that it's "too soon to call peak deaths, but maybe ..."

That, too, may be influenced by shift in demographics, since younger people are less likely to die from coronavirus, even among those who are hospitalized and admitted to intensive care, according to a June Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

But more data is needed before experts can say for sure whether deaths per day are trending downward.

There are signs of cases peaking in some hotspot states

The US reported 66,300 new cases on Wednesday — a 13% increase from the daily case count a week earlier, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Roughly half of those cases came from coronavirus hotspot states California, Florida, and Texas.

Shepherdson says in his analysis that daily case numbers are now decreasing in Arizona and have peaked in California.

Texas and Florida may be following suit, Shepherdson wrote: "The past two days in Florida have been encouraging."

But cases are still rising steadily across southern states — Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and South Carolina — which may, in part, explain why the US's epidemic curve continues to bend upward.

What's more, daily numbers don't reveal much, as Spokane County Health Officer Dr. Bob Lutz cautioned this week.

"There is ups and downs, there is peaks. We're going to have days where we have a lot of cases and days where we have fewer cases, but I'm looking at trends over a week, over two weeks and that's what I would encourage you to look at," he told KHQ Channel 6 on Wednesday.