Our national response to the pandemic is essentially on-hold. If possible, Trump’s interest in the pandemic is even less than it was before the election. Biden’s hands are tied until January 20.
The pandemic itself, however, is not on-hold. In the United State alone, there have been over 11 million COVID-19 cases and over a quarter of a million resultant deaths. Below is updated answer to the state-level question I posed in my previous COVID-19 post:
Within the U.S., how badly is each state sucking relative to one another?
This 37-second video uses weekly new cases per capita by state to show relative spread across the U.S. since the beginning of the pandemic. The progressively darker shades reflect higher per capita new case counts. In addition to adding new data since my last version, I also reduced the number shades for better contrast and I increased the lowest threshold from 0% to 0.05% to allow white to show a controlled, but non-zero per capita infection rate. Complete eradication is outside of any reasonable planning horizon.
It’s unsurprising that state-level differences are so dramatic given their diverse and rapidly changing rules and regulations amidst the complete lack of a national response. While there are many things that can be derived from this visualization, here’s just a few that got my attention:
- Some states have done better than others but there are no safe zones. COVID-19 is a national problem.
- The initial April surge in New York received a lot of media attention but the state had things relatively under control by early June. Although they are recently seeing another surge, they’re still doing relatively better than most states. Given that they took the initial brunt of the pandemic when everyone was still in the dark about transmission and mitigation, they seem to have handled things pretty well.
- Overall, both the Northeast and Northwest have generally done better than the rest of the country.
- California has stayed pretty consistent throughout the pandemic. Since June, they’ve waffled in the middle of the pack – with the pandemic neither under control nor completely out of control.
- The South’s surge started in late June and has since waffled at a rate between that of California and Middle America.
- Middle America didn’t get much media attention since their raw numbers didn’t match those of the country’s population centers. However, on a per capita basis, these states never really had things under control and many are now in worse shape than New York was at its peak.
Of course, the big national takeaway from the visualization is simply that things are bad and getting worse. A vaccine will take time to complete and widely distribute and is thus not the immediate panacea that many think it is.
In the meantime, without some course correction, more people will get sick. More people will die. More healthcare workers and facilities will be so preoccupied trying to manage the pandemic that other medical issues will be pushed aside. More seniors will remain isolated from their loved ones and will die alone even if they don’t die of COVID-19.
We have to do better.