Has the Omicron Wave Peaked?

Given that we are going through yet another wave of Covid-19 infections (thanks a lot, Omicron variant), the question on many people’s minds is, “Has this wave peaked?” The best way to answer that question is to look at the data from Domo’s Covid-19 Tracker. All of the charts below are pulled from the tracker, and show data through Wednesday, Jan. 26, 2022.

There are a number of approaches we can take to see if this wave is receding in the U.S. One approach is to look at the rolling, seven-day average of new cases versus the week before and the week before that, as these two charts allow you to do:

As you can see—especially when looking at “U.S. New Cases vs 14 Days Prior”—the Omicron spikes have been higher than the Delta spikes. But, average cases are starting to go down, which is obviously great news.

The U.S. is a big place, of course—and the world even bigger—so you may also wonder where the peak has passed and where it may still be going up. (Moving forward, we will focus on the change to 14 days prior.)

For that, we can look at data as of Jan. 26 and use a trick I often employ in Domo: sort by the absolute value of the change in value. This means the biggest swings—positive or negative—will show at the top of the 20 most impacted states or countries.

Based on that approach, I can see that while New York, Florida, and California are experiencing big declines in new cases, Tennessee, Washington, Arizona, Kentucky, and Oklahoma continue to experience the opposite. On the global level, the U.S., United Kingdom, and Australia are coming down, while India, Brazil, Germany, and France continue to see an increase in new cases:

I often think maps can be overused as visualizations, but in this case they can be effective in quickly highlighting which states/countries have peaked (darker blues in the maps below) and which states/countries are still going up (darker oranges).

One Domo feature that is very useful in these charts and maps is the ability to create a hover label with multiple values using Tooltips. This allows the map or chart to visualize based on a main metric, and for hover to provide additional metrics, such as the specific new case averages that have changed:

While these are all great techniques to use to understand the Omicron wave, they can also be used to measure other key business metrics. And you can always check Domo’s Covid-19 Tracker for updated numbers. (Just scroll down to the “What has changed recently” section to see similar views to the above.)

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