COVID-19 is everywhere
It took time but the pandemic has ultimately spread evenly across the country
It’s hard to fathom that when I first wrote about this pandemic in January it would still be the main driving story for the world nine months later. Those daily newsletters now serve as an interesting time capsule with my thoughts and reactions to things as they were happening at the time.
In particular, I was recently thinking about a post I made on March 22, where I analyzed the number of COVID-19 infections for each state to highlight just how hard some areas had been hit:
At the time, my thinking was that some states would see more economic impact from COVID than other states. While this is obviously going to be true for any event since each state has a different economic profile, at the time, I believed that some states (like New York) would be hit harder than others due to the sheer number of cases versus other states.
Unfortunately, the coronavirus didn’t stay isolated to a few hard-hit states. It is now everywhere:
The first thing to point out here is that the scale has changed by three orders of magnitude. In the first chart, I used infections per million residents. Now, we are talking about infections per thousand residents.
And, even though New York cases were far beyond any other state back in March, COVID has spread surprisingly evenly throughout the entire country. The economic impact will still vary between each state for an endless number of reasons but the disparity in coronavirus infections is not one of them.
More Metrics
U.S. cases continue to climb but deaths are thankfully lower than the March peak
Cases worldwide are climbing relentlessly but deaths are relatively flat
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