Worldometers is a site that is pretty strict about its data. Click on the "deaths per million" column and track down the states and their numbers. There are large dropoffs every few states. I follow this one consistently, so I have had plenty of opportunity to reflect on the initial politics, then voting patterns at the margin of these states. Therefore, I think it will be informative to my readers from many places to look at the individual states and what has been their attitudes so far, then compare it to the more recent numbers, where the high-death states are now appearing less dangerous, while the safe, warm, dispersed states are now seeing rapid increases in cases, ICU fill-up, and even deaths - and these deaths in the context of medical staff now having a much better idea of what to do with patients who show up with serious CoVid problems.
I'm not telling you anything, not about masks, or distancing, or opening up, or reporting irregularities. At this site we don't have expertise or (I hope) bias toward "We have to open up now, now, now" or "Put the hammer down on those reckless bastards who are endangering us all." I really hope that if everyone else goes Rhinoceros (2006 link, with great irony at this point) in one direction or the other, you can come here and just look at data without anyone kicking you.
From that launching point in the link in the first paragraph, you can also see countries and what is happening. But today, humor me by looking at the states' death-per-million and click also on the "Yesterday, Two days ago" data and just look at it, without comment. We want to settle on an opinion and hold it through March, April, and into July. But everything keeps changing, sometimes in ways we expected, sometimes in puzzling ways. I am not sure what I would advise my excellent governor Chris Sununu to do, even if I had time travel at this point. I thin I would want to wait until December and time travel then.
There is a quote attributed to John Maynard Keynes, Paul Samuelson, Winston Churchill, or Joan Robinson. It seems that none of them said it, but each said something vaguely like it. It is a great quote nonetheless, and one that we should flagellate ourselves with repeatedly. "When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?"
3 comments:
CDC provides graphs of cumulative deaths by state over time:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/pdf/Consolidated-Forecasts-2020-06-29.pdf
FWIW, they also show a whole bunch of different model predictions going forward.
Here in CT (a high death state due to Governor Lamont’s reluctance to shutdown commuter rail from NYC) there is an enormous range of response within a small state of 3.3 Million. I’ve plotted a lot of the data day by day in a number of towns and cities in CT. This is both as looking at risks for my employees (we were open constantly as a Critical Infrastructure business and worked nation wide). Since in CT everything is reported by towns (167 of them) I could see trends varying enormously over a short distance. Even for suburbs, with mostly single family housing the differences were stark. Either they had no significant trend from March to today or there was little change in the trend until late May. I could see no significant response to the lockdown in the high case towns. I’ve done a lot of engineering lifetime statistics and other propagation studies so felt pretty confident in my assessments. My guess is the Northeast states with high population density and cases/deaths (NYC, Northern NJ, CT on the rail lines, MA in boston) simply ran out of enough uninflected people in the key areas to keep the rates from dropping.
When I looked at places my employees were traveling to we saw much the same trends but much lower death rates. Utah for example has about 3 Million, most of which live near Salt Lake, They had 153 deaths a few weeks ago vs 4300 in CT. Hot spots were parts of Salt Lake City, an early burst around Park City (Ski Areas and Sundance Film Festival) and on the Indian Reservations in the South East. A pretty significant lockdown was present from late March to early May. The Northeast states also had their peaks before widespread testing was available. Now many younger people are being sent for tests by their employers with few or no symptoms rather than the two+ symptoms plus fever that was the criteria early.
Unfortunately the issue is now so political that a truly scientific assessment of public health measures is very difficult. I find this sentiment echoed by many people I talk to in the essential businesses (from my Pet Food store owner to barbers etc.).
Thank you. I've posted the Worldometer link on Facebook, to spread it around.
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