March 28 US Confirmed Coronavirus Cases

Yesterday I predicted we would pass two milestones on Saturday: 20,000 new cases and 2,000 cumulative fatalities. The latter milestone we blew past, with the total fatalities now at 2,198. The former milestone we did not pass, with "only" 19,818 new cases, but as that number is over 99% of the way there I don't think I will feel the model "failed" here.

More importantly, yesterday's number of new cases represented an increase of only 18.9% over the previous day. Are we flattening the curve, or are we seeing a "weekend dip" as some testing centers close? I certainly hope the former, but we'll need a few days to see....

Here is my graph of the last 7 days in infection rates. As always, I am measuring the number of states that fall within certain ranges of infections rates, counted per 100,000, and each column represents a doubling of the rates of the column to its left.



And here is the list of infection rates by state:


Notes for Saturday:

• Massachusetts has pulled ahead of Washington State.
• Guam has dropped back below Vermont.
• Texas has dropped even lower than usual.

Looking at the counties I'm tracking:

• Westchester looks like a disaster, with nearly 1% of the populace infected. But the good news is that Saturday's new cases was only 9.5% of the total to that point, a drop of over 50% from Friday's numbers. Weekend blip, or real?
• We're now up to 9 counties over the "magic number" of 300 cases per 100,000: 5 are New York-area, 3 are ski-resort counties, and one is New Orleans.
• I was doing a bit of digging around and found a surprising addition to make: Caddo Parish, LA. Caddo's biggest city is Shreveport. Why are their infection rates so high?
• I added Lancaster County, PA just out of curiousity; that is where my son goes to school.

My list of the top ten most concerning cities/areas in the US are:

1. New York City. The New York-White Plains-Jersey City MSA is approaching 400 cases per 100,000 people.
2. Ski Resort Towns. Park City is the third ski-resort area to top 300 cases per 100,000.
3. New Orleans. The situation there is dire; the reports I read about what the hospitals are like there is truly disturbing.
4. Long Island. Since I've focused so extensively on the core NYC/suburbs area, I think it only fair I list the other more distantly connected regions separately. Long Island refers to Nassau & Suffolk counties, not to Kings (Brooklyn) and Queens counties, whose numbers are included with NYC's.
5. Albany, GA. Healthcare workers who have Covid-19 are being asked to come in and work anyway (hopefully only with Covid-19 confirmed patients).
6. Detroit.
7. Seattle.
8. Bartow County, GA.
9. Boston.
10. Bridgeport, CT. Another NYC CSA community I'm breaking out.

Next on the list would be Shreveport, Albany NY, Milwaukee, and Denver. Miami/Ft. Lauderdale would be 17th, and Silicon Valley would be 19th or so.

I'm going to have a rant at the end of this post, but first we haven't viewed testing rates in a while, so let's take a look:

Notes:

• Not surprisingly, Louisiana and Massachusetts have upped their testing rates significantly; New Jersey, too. Texas has dropped quite a bit from their already low levels, and California continues to be awful.
• I had to remove Hawaii's data because they are no longer reporting the number of negative results they're getting.

My rant:

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida may be the most criminally negligent politician in the United States. He refused to make any effort to shut down the beaches for Spring Break, and continues to refuse to enact any state-wide measures to order people to stay at home. Yes, many other regions had major tourism events that have led to horrible spreads of coronavirus; New Orleans being a prime example, but Mardi Gras occurred before people realised how bad things were; there was no such excuse for Spring Break. Yes, many other states do not enact state-wide stay-at-home orders; Texas comes to mind. But while I don't agree with Texas governor Greg Abbott's decision not to extend a state-wide order, I at least see a logic to the idea that many counties in Texas are incredibly sparsely populated, and the stay-at-home orders should be done at the county level.

When I've looked at the Spring Break situation in Florida, I've been focused on the idea of spreading the disease around Florida. What had not occurred to me was what would happen when those kids went home. Well thanks to a data location company, we have a clearer picture.

This is a screenshot from a video the company tweeted out. You can find an article discussing this, with links to the actual tweet, here. But the gist of this is that the researchers isolated a single beach in Ft. Lauderdale, tracked all the phones that were there in the week of Spring Break (there were ~5,000), and then watched where they went over the subsequent week (presumably home, as most colleges had shut by then). This screenshot shows where those phones went, and what strikes me is how brightly lit the upper midwest is: Chicago, Ohio, Indiana, and especially Detroit. Pointedly, the kids in Florida were from all over the country east of the Mississippi, and so far my records show that these are the most heavily affected counties in the country. Don't blame the kids. Expecting kids to show good foresight of possible consequences for future actions is a loser's game. Even adults don't do particularly well. That's what leadership is about, and DeSantis has not only failed spectacularly, he has endangered people across the nation. And I think he knows this, and that this is why he has started decrying the movement of people from New York to Florida. The interesting part of this is, I have yet to see evidence that this is happening on a large scale. As I've searched for evidence, I've seen claims of this movement, but it's all anecdotal. The only article I've seen that made even an attempt to discover the veracity of the claim noted that roughly a third to a half of the flights from the NYC area to Florida over the prior three days had been cancelled outright. That seems to indicate not that more people than usual are heading there, but fewer than usual.