How the US is looking – Corona Virus Update

Honestly not so great. It’s simply astonishing that the President is fighting for the total power to open up the states when we’re in this shape.

Take a look at the charts for the US below; they should be familiar if you’ve been following my King county charts.

The data says that we’ve successfully stepped off of the horrific exponential curve that we were on, primarily driven by New York and New Jersey. It turns out they’ve been fairly successful, and that’s driving this success. But nothing in the national data says we’ve turned the corner and our new infections are down to zero.

To quantify that, let’s introduce a single number – the 3 day CAGR. This gives us an idea of the growth in new cases averaged over three days. That number for the United States is around 8% per day – bad, but not awful.

If we remove New York and New Jersey from the CAGR, we end up in a worse spot – 9% CAGR. If we also pull out WA and CA, it gets even worse, 10%.

As we’ve seen, small differences in growth rate add up to huge differences in eventual numbers. If we simply assume that states’ current growth rates will continue (they won’t, but stay with me here), we start to see the problem. Today our “non NY, NJ, CA, and WA” case load is 225k. In 7 days, it grows to 437k.

It gets even more interesting looked at on a state by state basis. The table below breaks them out and does this 3-day CAGR calculation and 7 day projection for each of the 50 states. The results are listed in descending order of problems.

Note that a number of the very worst-growing states are exactly the kind of rural areas whose Republican governors are arguing for following Trump to open up. SD, NE, VA, KY all have CAGRs over 14%! I know they don’t *feel* like they’re in trouble today, but the relentless exponential math will overtake them and in a few weeks their *very* limited medical systems will be straining or overwhelmed. The idea that in 2 weeks when SD would be projected to have 40k cases, NE 9k, KY 12k Trump will declare victory and open up seems ridiculous. They will finally be entering long-delayed lockdown and begging him not to pressure them and instead to send ventilators and respiratory doctors to their rural hospitals.

State	3 day growth	CAGR	7 day Projection
South Dakota	421	31%	5,869
Rhode Island	1,249	24%	13,496
Nebraska	304	18%	2,754
Delaware	552	15%	4,747
Maryland	2,751	15%	23,520
Virginia	1,705	14%	14,434
Massachusetts	7,926	14%	67,016
Kentucky	596	14%	5,026
Connecticut	3,597	12%	30,055
New Mexico	356	12%	2,973
Iowa	440	12%	3,675
Illinois	5,603	11%	46,814
Alabama	965	11%	8,064
Minnesota	408	11%	3,415
Pennsylvania	5,746	10%	48,334
Mississippi	682	10%	5,755
Indiana	1,885	10%	15,941
Arkansas	329	10%	2,797
District Of Columbia	432	9%	3,680
North Carolina	1,061	9%	9,073
Missouri	971	9%	8,322
New Jersey	13,557	9%	116,975
Ohio	1,463	9%	12,626
Georgia	2,736	8%	23,923
Texas	2,851	8%	24,976
Florida	4,193	8%	36,745
Maine	138	8%	1,213
New Hampshire	201	8%	1,769
Kansas	270	8%	2,379
Colorado	1,482	8%	13,139
South Carolina	647	8%	5,789
North Dakota	62	8%	556
Oklahoma	385	8%	3,460
Arizona	684	8%	6,164
New York	34,151	7%	315,178
Tennessee	976	7%	9,021
West Virginia	110	7%	1,017
Nevada	515	7%	4,768
California	4,168	7%	38,652
Oregon	263	7%	2,484
Utah	387	7%	3,679
Michigan	4,131	6%	39,584
Vermont	120	6%	1,152
Wisconsin	543	6%	5,248
Alaska	42	6%	415
Wyoming	36	5%	387
Louisiana	2,733	5%	29,538
Hawaii	62	5%	694
Montana	40	4%	510
Washington	1,051	4%	13,737
Idaho	100	2%	1,723
Total:	118,375	8%	1,033,691
total no new york or jersey	70,667	9%	604,944
total no new york jersey wa or CA	51,628	10%	436,651

The pity, of course, is that if we’d all locked down together, as one nation, these rural states which have a huge natural advantage over cities would be ahead of the big coastal states. Instead they’ll be laggards and the coastal states will have to worry about infected people from red states re-lighting their fires.