As I watch the coverage of the Biden inauguration, I thought I’d take a look at the state of the pandemic in the United States which he will soon inherit. His predecessor leaves him not only this quagmire but numerous others.
Our country has seen almost 25 million COVID-19 cases and over 400,000 resultant deaths. My latest 48-second video shows weekly new cases per capita by state to help visualize the relative spread across the U.S. since the beginning of the pandemic. The progressively darker shades reflect higher per capita new case counts. I use a low threshold of 0.05% to allow a white color to imply a controlled, but non-zero per capita infection rate in a given state. Complete eradication is outside of any reasonable planning horizon.
New York was, of course, the initial hotbed back in March of 2020. Louisiana followed in short order. April and May saw a spread to middle America – which didn’t get as much press since the reported numbers were absolute and not per-capita. By summer, the spread was nationwide. Florida and Texas became hotspots and their larger populations drove up the absolute numbers. By fall, middle America was back at the forefront the pandemic’s worst per-capita numbers. Winter saw bad per-capita numbers across the country. California became a hotspot which again drove up the absolute numbers.
In short, the virus is all over the place. Hotspots appear everywhere. Weather doesn’t seem to have a huge impact and there is zero correlation with political affiliation. The only thing we can say with certainty is that overall, the pandemic keeps getting worse.
While continued mitigation (masks, social distancing, crowd avoidance) makes sense to slow the acceleration, it does appear that only way out of this is the vaccine.
Unfortunately, I’ve been underwhelmed with the rollout thus far due. Incompetence at all levels of government is inexcusable given the amount of time they’ve had to plan it.
As I said last time: We have to do better.