Once in my lifetime, for a span of weeks and only intermittently, I worked with a bona fide living remote epidemiological biostatistician. What a glorious experience. I have been nostalgic every week of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I bet in-person collaboration would have been even more fun but these days I would settle for email consultation.
Trying to track the current pandemic without the support of an epidemiological biostatistician has been trying. I did find historical case counts by US county but one really wants death and hospitalization numbers too. The CDC is reputed to have those numbers but getting them has been a problem (not only for me).
Since hospitals do not exist in every county you need to aggregate up to hospital service areas. For that we could extract the CDC's hospital service area model from their point-in-time community spread dataset. I hope that would be an adequate approximation.
But we are not trying to create a historical plot; we want a prognostication. For this we need more than just data. We need a continent-wide transmission model which we can verify against Alpha, Delta, and Omicron surges. With a verfied model we would be able to predict whether or not the rising case counts in New York and Massachusetts presage a surge over the whole country during April and May. To get there we need an epidemiological biostatistician.
Otherwise we are left with only the declaration of Melissa Niffenegger, candidate for school board in De Pere, who said "The COVID-19 pandemic is over". [The Press Times. April 1, 2022. Page 8.] But I doubt Melissa's qualifications.