Apr 4 US Confirmed Coronavirus Cases

Saturday saw the best news yet in terms of flattening the curve, with new cases representing only 12.4% of the totals from Friday. That's big news, and hopefully is not a function of the weekend. Last weekend we saw numbers dip dramatically on Saturday, and pick up a bit on Sunday, but in general the trend held. This is wonderful news, but in a reminder that we are always looking at the past, I do expect US fatalities to hit 10,000 Sunday. And that is not including the NY Times' claim that US deaths are underreported due to poor protocols and lack of resources.

I've decided to alter my chart a bit, to only show the first and last days of the 7-day period of coverage. My hope is that it makes the curve easier to read.

The takeaway here is that growth is slowing. In earlier charts we were essentially increasing 4-fold over the chart's 7-day period. Now it is slightly more than 2-fold over the 7 days.

Let's take a look at the states:


Colorado moved down a few places, but I suspect that is a testing/reporting issue, not reality. Delaware moved up quite a bit.

Let's drill down to the counties now. I added two new counties, also ski resort areas. One is Blaine County, Idaho, home to Sun Valley ski resort. The other is Mono County, California, home to Mammoth Mountain ski resort.

Notes:

• Well, I can't keep you in suspense any longer, the big news is that we have uncovered a new county with the highest rate of infection in the country. I will go into Blaine County in my Thought of the Day section. There's a good story here.
• Mono County has, by far, the highest rate of infection in California.
• There are now 25 counties at or exceeding the "magic number" of 300 cases per 100,000. This is a big increase over yesterday, with 8 new counties on the list.
• There are 4 counties at or exceeding a 1% known infection rate, compared to 2 yesterday.

My list of the communities with the highest rates of infection is:

1. Sun Valley/Ketcham, ID.
2. New York-White Plains-Jersey City.
3. New Orleans.
4. Long Island.
5. Albany, GA.
6. Vail, CO.
7. Poughkeepsie, NY.
8. Crested Butte, CO.
9. Park City, UT.
10. Newark, NJ.
11. Bridgeport, CT.
12. Boston.
13. Shreveport, LA.
14. Detroit.
15. Aspen, CO.
16. Philadelphia.
17. Indianapolis.
18. Breckinridge, CO.
19. Jackson Hole, WY.
20. Seattle.

Miami would be 23rd, while Mono County, CA would be 25th. Seattle is one of the slowest-growing regions, and will soon be off the list entirely.

Thought for the day: I was informed of the situation in Idaho's Sun Valley by a friend of mine, whose husband grew up in Idaho. My initial reaction was a bit dismissive; I'd suspected I'd already found most of the hardest hit ski communities, and the ones left were more "local destinations" that just didn't draw in the level outside travel necessary to cause a Covid-19 hotspot. But she told me about this article in The New Yorker, and I knew it would be a good one because of the fact that they were referring to case rates, not number of cases. The article does a good job of explaining how the infection may have spread. Sun Valley had hosted a large group of African-American skiers from around the country and even England. But it turns out that this group was not likely to be the source of the infection, but rather the victims of it. And that shows the two sides of risk in travel, that the tourists bring coronavirus to a tourist destination, and then that they bring it home. I really recommend reading the article, and for a really deep dive you check out this article in Adventure Journal which may have sparked the New Yorker article (and is linked there as well).

Along with that, I also will point you to this New York Times article about how 430,000 people traveled from China to the US since the beginning of the outbreak, 40,000 since the travel ban was imposed. There are some interesting notes there, and some lack of information as well (such as how many came from Hubei province, the epicenter of the breakout). There are two main takeaways for me, however. One is that Trump's travel ban was, in the end, not effective because it was at heart too late (and also that screening has been incredibly lax, something we knew about when the European travel ban was put into effect). Another is this chart:

There seems (with two exceptions) to be a pretty high correlation between the number of flights from China and the rates of infection currently. I've wondered why, for example, Detroit had such high levels of infection, but clearly Detroit had a significant amount of traffic with China. Why is Dallas worse than Houston? Well, they had more than twice the number of flights from China. The two exceptions are SFO and LAX. However, those airports are in California, which established the first statewide stay-at-home orders in the country, long before there were any signs of high levels of coronavirus infections in the state. I've long criticized the federal government, the state of California, and the media for greatly exaggerating the infection levels in California, but I think one positive of that may have been that they enacted policies that helped greatly slow the rate of infection. Perhaps had California not acted so aggressively, their exaggerations would have been real, or even a case of minimizing the reality.