Covid Chronicles. Chapter 69: Drilling Down to the County Level

 

Read chapter 68 here

Thursday, August 20. 2020

This section of the letter can be considered an update from what I wrote in April. 

For about six months, I have been graphing and otherwise tracking COVID statistics on daily basis. At first, I focused on broad-based worldwide and U.S. reports, specifically the numbers of confirmed cases and deaths each day. Two examples are shown here. The ‘China and elsewhere’ graph became a useless exercise toward the end of March, when it became clear that China wasn't being forthcoming with accurate statistics. By mid-April, I had lost interest in the second graph when it became clear that the United States was likely to become the world’s hot spot.  

The second graph shows an initially exponential followed by a steady increase in new Covid cases during the first four months of the pandemic. Not that we’re now seeing an appreciable improvement. The U.S. reported 1,927,863 cases in July, an average of nearly 62,000 cases per day. At least we’re experiencing a drop so far in August, although I think some of it is related to reduced testing. Wisconsin, for example reported a daily average of 16,064 tests from August 4-8. The average for the past 4 days (August 16-19) decreased more than 50% to 7,908. I’ve seen similar recent patterns in other states.

 As the spread of the virus became particularly virulent in the northeastern U.S., I initiated a series of blogposts titled “Day by day: COVID-19 cases in (state’s name here)”. The inaugural group of states included New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and, to keep a close watch on developments here, Wisconsin. I added Michigan and Illinois when those two state became seriously impacted in early April. All but the Wisconsin version of the ‘day by day’ maps have been deleted. 

As major coronavirus outbreaks occurred in southern and western states, I found a daily approach became too time-consuming. Unless I wanted to blog the entire day — never an option — I had no time left over to cover other topics of personal interest: U.S. demographics (“Trump’s America”), photo chronologies of Middleton and Madison construction projects, local and statewide Wisconsin elections, to name a few. As a result, I decided to update the graphs on a ‘week by week’ instead of a ‘day by day’ basis. Besides, as you can clearly see in the above graph, I was literally running out of room to insert more numbers. And I had already reduced the font size to a point where they were barely discernible to the naked eye. (At least to my eyes.) 

The weekly approach allowed me to expand my coverage. When a state’s numbers started to explode, I’d attempt to add them into the mix. More than a month ago, I reached the point where updated an average of 5 states per day. As you might imagine, this ‘workload’ became unsustainable – I maxed out, in other words -- so the states that have reduced their weekly tally of new cases are updated every other week. And it’s been nearly two months since I added any states to the series, even though Oklahoma and Missouri now deserve serious consideration. Five months into the U.S. phase of this project, I’m ready to consider a ‘month by month’ approach. With continuing lack of presidential leadership and inability to coordinate a coherent response at the federal level, the pandemic is not likely going to be brought under control anytime soon. And it certainly is not going to magically disappear, as Trump keeps insisting. In late April, as the crisis in New York and other northeastern states ebbed, I anticipated that, as a country, we would have flattened the curve, as most of the rest of the industrialized world has done. (Or seems to have done. It makes me uneasy, though, that some European

countries, such as Germany, for one, have seen such as Germany, for one, have seen their numbers tick upward, though nowhere near their peak levels, fortunately. An 8/7/2020 New York Times article, “At Europe's Illegal Parties, the Virus is the Last Thing on People's Minds”, featured a photo of a large group of young people at a rave party on the outskirts of Berlin. According to Eddie, who spent time in Berlin during his solo trip to Europe, the city is renowned for its party spirit.) 

My focus now is increasingly on Wisconsin counties. The Wisconsin Department of Health Services’ website (screenshot shown above) provides a daily update on confirmed new cases. This is the data I use to prepare my own daily updates on Retiring Guy’s Digest and Facebook, the most time-consuming aspect of my COVID information sharing but also the most appreciated. The detailed updates are shown below. 

If you slice the Wisconsin on a diagonal from southwest to northeast, all but 3 of the 24 counties with the highest COVID-19 positive test rate per 100,000 persons are located to the right of the line. I’ve dubbed the 5 southeastern counties of Wisconsin (Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, Walworth, and Waukesha) the state’s coronavirus ‘hot corner’. Of the 67,493 confirmed COVID cases in Wisconsin, these 5 counties account for 35,646, or 53%. They account for 31% of the state’s population. All of them are in the top 10 of positive test rates. What’s lacking here is a regional response to the virus. But the longstanding political, racial, and cultural splits between the city of Milwaukee and the rest of the hot corner precludes any such consideration.