March 20 US Confirmed Coronavirus Cases

Friday saw the number of cases in the US cross the 20,000 mark. We also saw some other interesting statistical notes, the first of which I will detail here and the later I'll address below. It apparently took 2 months for the number of Covid-19 cases worldwide to hit 100,000. It took less than 2 weeks to hit 200,000.

Here's the chart I find most illustrative:


Things I note:

• We've again added another column to the right edge.
• Everything is shifting to the right. Take, for example, the 2-4 cases per 100,000 column. On Wednesday that was sort of the "leading edge". There were 15 states with numbers there, but 36 states with fewer, and only 5 states with more. As of Friday the plurality of states (20) had 2-4 cases per 100,000, with only 19 states (roughly half as many as Wednesday) with fewer cases, and 17 states with more!

Now let's look at the states proper:

Some notes here:

• New York has more than twice the per capita number of coronavirus cases as does Washington. Two days prior they were nearly identical. Why? I'm hesitant to assign any sort of blame or speculate about the effectiveness of one state's policies vs another. It certainly seems from what I've seen that New York is taking things very seriously and has been for quite a while. Perhaps it has more to do with density, or in my mind even more likely, the number of unique initial disease carriers (ie the number of unique individuals entering the state infected already).
• We keep hearing about the three hotspot states: New York, Washington, and California. But California is right in the middle, 25th in infection rate (and that's a drop from 18th on Wednesday). Louisiana, Washington, DC, and New Jersey all have rates more than three times as high as California's.

Now let's look at the worst-hit counties:

Notes from the county list:

• New York County (Manhattan) is now at a case rate of almost 350 per 100,000. At this rate in only a few days we will speak of Manhattan's infection rate in percentages. This is also higher than the level I estimated for the Lombardy region of Italy, where their hospitals were being overwhelmed and the death rate was astonishingly high. I mentioned before and continue to hope that Manhattan has a higher level of medical infrastructure, both within the county and reasonably nearby, that it shouldn't be in crisis yet, and currently the CFR (case fatality rate) of 0.75% makes me hopeful that is true, though realistically we may need another week to see if this actually is true.
• The infection rate in Eagle County, Colorado (where Vail is) continues to astonish me. And the local newspaper there quotes a county health official who says the real number may be 10 or more times higher. This caused me to get curious about some other ski resort areas, so I looked at Pitkin and San Miguel Counties in Colorado (home to Aspen and Telluride respectively), as well as Summit County in Utah (home to Park City). Pitkin County is just about where Eagle County was yesterday, making them the 5th most severely infected county on my list, but San Miguel and Summit Counties have yet to report a case.
• I've been speaking already about how bad things are in the New Orleans area, with Orleans Parish the 4th most severely infected county in the country, and the absence of press around it. I've uncovered another hotspot that is worse than California's Bay area which I haven't heard one word about: Detroit. Michigan's Oakland County, a wealthy suburb NW of Detroit, has a worse infection rate than San Mateo County, California's hardest-hit county, while Wayne County (Detroit proper), is just under and higher than all other California counties. Again, I'm looking at you Kanye, and waiting to hear your concern about the president and black people. But I'm also looking at the Detroit Free Press. Perusing their website, you would think they don't realize they are one of the worst-infected communities in America.
• Travis County (Austin) is the hardest-hit county in Texas, by a fair amount (50% higher than the next highest county, Fort Bend (a Houston suburb)). Why? Given the disastrous lack of testing in Texas, it is possible that Austin as the state capital has had better access than other communities. But another factor related to the terrible way we began this social-distancing experiment also comes to mind: the city took a big risk, cancelling the SXSW festival. But UT held an NCAA basketball playoff game AFTER the SXSW cancellation announcement, shoving 13,000 screaming fans into a stadium. Could people have gotten exposed there?

My list of the worst-affected communities is:

1. New York
2. Eagle County, CO
3. New Orleans
4. Pitkin County, CO
5. Seattle
6. Detroit
7. Bay Area, California
8. Boston
9. Denver
10. Miami-Ft. Lauderdale