Added text to the title reflect the use of time during the pandemic, as articulated in that first post.

There is a lot of lag time in the statistics reported now about COVID infection, hospitalization, and death trends. The CDC Data Tracker is about 10 days behind (far better than any others I could find and make sense of).

If you go look at the numbers here you can learn a bit more:
COVID Data Tracker - set the geographic area, and choose the left and right axes to get numbers that might make sense. There is a slider at the bottom to move it to looking at more recent times versus cumulative numbers.

People are still reporting getting exposed to it, to catching it, to being vaccinated against it. It's still a big deal, but so shopworn that people ignore it now.