Talk:COVID-19 pandemic in the United States

Skip to table of contents

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find medical sources: Source guidelines · PubMed · Cochrane · DOAJ · Gale · OpenMD · ScienceDirect · Springer · Trip · Wiley · TWL

Archives: Index, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17: 30 days

The contentious topics procedure applies to this page. This page is related to COVID-19, broadly construed, which has been designated as a contentious topic.

Editors who repeatedly or seriously fail to adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, any expected standards of behaviour, or any normal editorial process may be blocked or restricted by an administrator. Editors are advised to familiarise themselves with the contentious topics procedures before editing this page.

WikiProject COVID-19 consensus

WikiProject COVID-19 aims to add to and build consensus for pages relating to COVID-19. They have so far discussed items listed below. Please discuss proposed improvements to them at the project talk page.

General

Superseded by TfD October 2020 and later practice - consult regular {{Current}} guidance.

Refrain from using Worldometer (worldometers.info) as a source due to common errors being observed as noted on the Case Count Task Force common errors page. (April 2020, April 2020)

For infoboxes on the main articles of countries, use Wuhan, Hubei, China for the origin parameter. (March 2020)

"Social distancing" is generally preferred over "physical distancing". (April 2020, May 2020)

Page title

COVID-19 (full caps) is preferable in the body of all articles, and in the title of all articles/category pages/etc.(RM April 2020, including the main article itself, RM March 2021).

SARS-CoV-2 (exact capitalisation and punctuation) is the common name of the virus and should be used for the main article's title, as well as in the body of all articles, and in the title of all other articles/category pages/etc. (June 2022, overturning April 2020)

Map

There is no consensus about which color schemes to use, but they should be consistent within articles as much as possible. There is agreement that there should be six levels of shading, plus gray for areas with no instances or no data. (May 2020)

There is no consensus about whether the legend, the date, and other elements should appear in the map image itself. (May 2020)

For map legends, ranges should use fixed round numbers (as opposed to updating dynamically). There is no consensus on what base population to use for per capita maps. (May 2020)

To ensure you are viewing the current list, you may wish to purge this page.

This article is written in American English, which has its own spelling conventions (color, defense, traveled) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

COVID-19 Mid‑importance

	COVID-19 portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject COVID-19, a project to coordinate efforts to improve all COVID-19-related articles. If you would like to help, you are invited to join and to participate in project discussions.COVID-19Wikipedia:WikiProject COVID-19Template:WikiProject COVID-19COVID-19 articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Disaster management Mid‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Disaster management, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Disaster management on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Disaster managementWikipedia:WikiProject Disaster managementTemplate:WikiProject Disaster managementDisaster management articles
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the project's importance scale.

Donald Trump High‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Donald Trump, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Donald Trump on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Donald TrumpWikipedia:WikiProject Donald TrumpTemplate:WikiProject Donald TrumpDonald Trump articles
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

Joe Biden High‑importance

	COVID-19 pandemic in the United States is within the scope of WikiProject Joe Biden, a project dedicated to creating and improving content related to Joe Biden. If you would like to participate, visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Joe BidenWikipedia:WikiProject Joe BidenTemplate:WikiProject Joe BidenJoe Biden articles
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the importance scale.

Medicine: Pulmonology Low‑importance

	Medicine portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Medicine, which recommends that medicine-related articles follow the Manual of Style for medicine-related articles and that biomedical information in any article use high-quality medical sources. Please visit the project page for details or ask questions at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine.MedicineWikipedia:WikiProject MedicineTemplate:WikiProject Medicinemedicine articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.
	This article is supported by the Pulmonology task force (assessed as Mid-importance).

Science Policy High‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Science Policy, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Science policy on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Science PolicyWikipedia:WikiProject Science PolicyTemplate:WikiProject Science PolicyScience Policy articles
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

United States: History / 50,000 Challenge High‑importance

	United States portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject United States, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of topics relating to the United States of America on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the ongoing discussions. Template Usage Articles Requested! Become a Member Project Talk Alerts United StatesWikipedia:WikiProject United StatesTemplate:WikiProject United StatesUnited States articles
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.
	This article is supported by WikiProject U.S. history (assessed as High-importance).
	This article was created or improved during this WikiProject's 50,000 Challenge, which started on November 1, 2016, and is ongoing. You can help!

Viruses Low‑importance

	Viruses portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Viruses, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of viruses on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.VirusesWikipedia:WikiProject VirusesTemplate:WikiProject Virusesvirus articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Text and/or other creative content from COVID-19 pandemic in the United States was copied or moved into Social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States with this edit on July 22, 2020. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists.

Other talk page banners

Daily pageviews of this article

A graph should have been displayed here but graphs are temporarily disabled. Until they are enabled again, visit the interactive graph at pageviews.wmcloud.org

Section sizes

Section size for COVID-19 pandemic in the United States (36 sections)
Section name	Byte count	Section total
(Top)	22,058	22,058
Timeline	442	91,261
December 2019 to April 2020	18,850	18,850
May to August 2020	8,772	8,772
September to December 2020	10,962	10,962
January to April 2021	10,076	10,076
May to August 2021	6,758	6,758
September to November 2021	3,107	3,107
December 2021 to March 2022	1,962	1,962
April to June 2022	6,643	6,643
July to September 2022	2,846	2,846
October to December 2022	5,558	5,558
January to March 2023	3,430	3,430
April to June 2023	1,047	1,047
July to September 2023	5,001	5,001
October to December 2023	1,504	1,504
January to March 2024	4,303	4,303
Responses	20,331	20,331
Impacts	12	20,582
Economic	10,059	10,059
Social	7,332	7,332
Elections	3,019	3,019
Hospital care crisis	160	160
Vaccination campaign	1,680	7,639
Timeline graph of doses administered	1,130	1,130
Background to various vaccines	108	108
Vaccine mandates	2,854	2,854
Effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines	1,867	1,867
Transition to later phases	4,174	4,174
Preparations made after previous outbreaks	4,204	4,204
Statistics	116	116
See also	230	230
Notes	134	134
References	30	30
Further reading	2,556	2,556
External links	2,830	2,830
Total	176,145	176,145

This article has been viewed enough times in a single year to make it into the Top 50 Report annual list. This happened in 2020, when it received 19,707,145 views.

This article has been viewed enough times in a single week to appear in the Top 25 Report 9 times. The weeks in which this happened:

The following references may be useful when improving this article in the future:

Differential Effects of Intervention Timing on COVID-19 Spread in the United States (waiting for peer-reviewed version) - preprint with links to extensive press coverage e.g. At Least 54,000 U.S. Deaths Could Have Been Avoided If Lockdown Had Come Two Weeks Earlier

Wiki Education assignment: EDT 251 - Research Skills and Strategies[edit]

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 8 March 2022 and 13 May 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Siyuxu (article contribs). Peer reviewers: Yuxiang Dou, Weix7.

Again[edit]

I've complained before, and I'll repeat: the graph/chart is nearly completely USELESS. It depicts, in red, constant-function and delivers zero useful information. I've objected in the past to its use, which from its earliest use was a poor way to show what it claims to show: total & current infections, and cumulative deaths. I have no problem with the list of deaths per day - except that it's limited to the last 15 days (why, I don't know). It was and is poorly conceived and executed. I vote for removal and replacement with separate graphs one showing cumulative (est.) deaths from March 2020, and another showing daily or better weekly averaged daily death rates. There is no information presented in the current chart about active infections and that's fine as far as I'm concerned. Incidentally, it is well-known that "current infections" can't be known and is poorly understood. Current hospitalizations would be a far better metric. When it's estimated that over 90% of the population has had exposure to the virus (with most exposed able to *avoid* an initial run-away infection (for certain values of 'initial'), it makes little (I think zero) sense to mention "active" infections!)98.17.44.45 (talk) 09:17, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Return-to-office mandates[edit]

I can't find a single Wikipedia article that covers corporate and government return-to-office mandates. If there is one, could someone point me to it? ☆ Bri (talk) 20:27, 18 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Please edit it[edit]

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

“Contracting the virus from a ski trip, Garfield was able to return to the slopes, although with fingers and toes amputated.”

Please add “some” before “fingers and toes”, as per source. I thought he had them all amputed. 2804:14D:5C32:4673:E399:DDB9:17B5:8D2A (talk) 01:45, 11 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Done. Good catch. A. Randomdude0000 (talk) 01:51, 11 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Transition to Endemic Stage is Misleading[edit]

Firstly, "transition to endemic stage" is a misleading subsection title: The CDC has never stated Covid-19 is endemic but that the emergency phase is over: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/your-health/end-of-phe.html

Also, Dr. Anthony Fauci walked back his wording that Covid-19 was endemic shortly after he was quoted saying that: he said following that comment it wasn't quite what he meant and we are still in a pandemic: https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2022-04-28/fauci-walks-back-coronavirus-comments-says-pandemic-not-over-in-u-s

Therefore, I think "transition to endemic stage" itself is a misleading and a more accurate term for this subsection ought to replace it: "ending of the emergency phase" for example.

And if the moderators do not feel the links I have provided are cause to change the subsection title, I would kindly ask that my two notes with links be included in the "transition to endemic" subsection.

Thank you. Berniethecat (talk) 17:45, 9 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I changed it to "Transition to later phases" to match the present state of the general pandemic article. Information about the end of the PHE and Fauci walking back his wording is already in the article, the latter in the heading itself.

Also, to be clear, I am not a mod and Wikipedia doesn't have mods per se; see WP:ADMIN for what administrators do (which I am not) and WP:SILVERLOCK for why this article is not able to be edited by some users. Crossroads ^-talk- 18:08, 9 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for making it more accurate. Berniethecat (talk) 18:42, 9 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Wiki Education assignment: English Composition 1102 085[edit]

This article is currently the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 4 March 2024 and 2 May 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Narangy (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Narangy (talk) 05:23, 11 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]