Read chapter 81 here
Sunday, November 8, 2020
Every afternoon at 2 o’clock, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services updates its Covid webpages with an in-depth report on new cases. And every day, no matter where I am — at home, in a car, waking with JoAnna, monitoring a line of voters at city hall — I check the numbers. For my purposes, I am most interested in the summary statistics displayed here.
If I happen to be at home, which is usually the case, I begin my own series of updates. Using a map of Wisconsin counties outlined and named, I first update the
summary information at the top of the page — total people tested, previous day’s total, total positive cases, total from previous day. From here I proceed to the individual county data and note the number of total Covid cases and (latest daily new cases)
within the border of each county on a state map. As you can see with the counties along Lake Michigan and tiny Pepin County in the west-central part of the state, I don’t always have always have room to stay within the lines.
To put the numbers in perspective, I update a bar graph of counties where the positive test rate per 100,000 people is above the state average. Milwaukee, for example, is the state’s most populous county (945,000) and, by far has reported the most Covid cases, but it ranks 19th in positivity. On the other hand, Menominee County, with a population of 4,233, is the least populous, yet it has the highest positivity rate by a considerable margin.
(Sidebar: it’s worth noting here that half of the counties in the top 6 of the graph at the top of the post have the largest percentage of Native Americans. Created in 1959, Menominee County (87%) is essentially the Menominee Indian reservation. Native Americans comprise 6% of the population of #2 Shawano County, compared to 1% statewide. In addition, Forest County, which borders the UP in northeastern Wisconsin, has a comparatively large percentage of Native Americans (11%). According to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services statistics, Native Americans have a significantly higher rate of infections than Whites.)
When the pandemic first struck, I updated a graph of Wisconsin total number of Covid cases on a daily basis. After a month, the numbers became illegible, so I went to weekly updates. After a few months, the graph became less instructive. The trajectory made it appear that case numbers were flattening (though not yet shown in an early version at above left), but that was clearly not the case. Last month I decided to use the
7-day averages of new cases from the 1st and 25th of each month as reported by the New York Times. These numbers provide a much more dramatic picture of how
Late this summer, I decided to revive the daily graph of new Covid cases but limited the timeline to a month’s worth of data. Unfortunately, it’s been quite a while since Wisconsin reported less than 1,000 new cases in a day. Not since September 14th.
Living the Covid bubble life, I have plenty of time for this daily statistical review. I use the data extensively when blogging and post a daily summary on Facebook, which regularly receives appreciative comments. Graphs have long been an important element of my blogposts, so it was a natural development to immerse myself in Covid data.
As it turns out, the virus didn’t suddenly disappear after the election. In fact, the U.S. crashed through the 100,000 threshold of new cases on November 4th — 113,915, to be exact, and then obliterated that mark on each of the next two days.
The way things are going right now, I’m likely to continue the updates through the winter and well into the spring, especially if the rest of the country adopts Wisconsin’s latest fashion statement.
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