Local (and not-so-local) COVID-19 updates

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Day-over-day changes are all good for once; deaths, cases, hospitalizations, and seven-day averages are all down. The state is below five hundred people hospitalized with COVID for the first time since August 20, 2021.

The big news today on the COVID front is, of course, the massive change to community guidelines (specifically including masking recommendations) that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced today:
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The official explanation of the new criteria is available on the CDC website:

The COVID-19 community level is determined by the higher of the inpatient beds and new admissions indicators, based on the current level of new cases per 100,000 population in the past 7 days.

I find myself rather cynical about how magically the nation went from having 95% of its counties having so much COVID that everyone needs to mask up (under yesterday's guidelines) to only 37% of counties needing everyone to mask up (under the new guidelines). I guess the operative question going forward will be whether these guidelines will pick up on the next surge in time to prevent yet another medical systems collapse? (They're clearly giving up on stamping out SARS-COV-2 transmission.)

The town of Acton's current Google Data Studio dashboard is showing 10 active and 2,768 cumulative cases as of February 23, and has not been updated since. The most recent "newsflash style update" at 7PM on December 21, 2021, the town reported 1538 cumulative cases with 89 individuals in isolation, 1417 recovered and 32 fatalities.