From a community article on Daily Kos
I do a weekly analysis of COVID-19 case trends. I use the county level cases reported by The New York Times.
Harvard Global Health Institute, Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Rockefeller Foundation, CovidActNow, Covid-Local, CIDRAP and many others joined forces, and launched a COVID Risk Level map and COVID suppression guidance for policy makers and the public.
They have defined four COVID Risk Levels based on the 7-day moving average of daily new cases per 100,000 population. You can read more about their framework here: globalepidemics.org/…
I added a fifth level: 50+ cases per 100k just to better depict just how high the case counts are.
Let’s start with the beginning of summer.
June 1 map
June 1: The map highlights only the 10+ cases per 100k to better show where the highest cases are. Boston and Chicago Metros have elevated case counts, but no reds. Metro Baltimore/DC/Northern Virginia is high and there are sporadic cases in the south. mostly Mississippi and Alabama. There are hints of an outbreak coming in Arizona. But overall, it seems masks and social distancing did their job.
July 1 map
July 1: Yep — Arizona is getting slammed. Florida and South Carolina have a lot of reds. The impacts from Memorial Day and beaches/lifting social distancing? I will leave that to the infectious disease experts. The Mid-Atlantic and Northeast have their lowest level of cases.
August 1 map
August 1: Houston, we have a problem, and not just Houston. The entire South is on fire. We are also seeing hints of what is about to hit the Midwest.
September 1 map
September 1: The fire in the South is calming down, but still oranges showing elevated cases. But there are also more reds in the Midwest. Notice how the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, as well as western Washington and Oregon are still fairly quiet. Schools and universities just started to open in the end of August. Get ready.
October 1 map
October 1: Now the Midwest is on fire, especially western Wisconsin. But notice while the south is quieter, there are embers still active. We have rounded the corner, right?
October 21 map
October 21: In a word, NO! Now the Midwest is a 6-alarm fire, but also notice the increase in cases (oranges and reds) in the South, Mid-Atlantic, and starting to creep into the Northeast.
As you can tell from this time series, areas do not go from red to green in 2 weeks. More like 2 months. And COVID-19 precaution fatigue — and more people just not caring or believing Trump’s lies about the dangers of COVID-19 — are likely to lead to a prolonged outbreak of this third wave.
The only real good news: flu activity is currently below normal.
Regeneron currently has 50,000 does of their RGEN-CoV2 cocktail, so that is not an option. Remdesivir studies have shown that it does not improve mortality, but does shorten severity and hospital stays.
It looks like it will be a hard and sad Fall 2020 for a lot of people.
Friday, Oct 23, 2020
Forgot to mention wearing masks. In July, NYT commissioned a survey of 250,000+ people to see how frequently they wear masks.
This plot is of the percent who rarely/never wear masks. It seems to correspond to the current outbreak. Red counties wear masks the least, purple counties wear masks the most.
