Covid-19 update

I’ve been writing daily updates for social media on the Covid-19 pandemic for the past 100 days or so. Since I have made them public, I figured I would share them here as well.

We are 100 days into this thing and people are apparently bored. The states with the highest population densities have had the highest numbers in absolute terms, with the exceptions for Nebraska and South Dakota and Louisiana. The only states that have crushed the curve as a group are the liberal ones that had to deal with the biggest rates of infection and death. The ones that had far lower rates are just beginning as the outbreak continues to grow in those more rural, conservative states where people’d rather wish it away than do anything. Again, they haven’t seen the deaths per population that New York, New Jersey, or Massachusetts have seen. Nowhere near, so I can sort of understand not wanting to worry about it, if one did not understand exponential growth. Which is kind of flabbergasting, since we all just *saw* exponential growth unfold in real time.

The top three quintiles of states by vote Republican for president in 2017 now each have an average daily case rates for covid-19 than the bottom two quintiles. It is in their courts now to see how they manage things and stack up to Cuomo. I’d say Newsom (CA) too, but we do not have things under control here and have not seen the sustained declines in daily new cases per capita that New York has achieved. Arizona, Arkansas, Alabama it is your turn to show some leadership.

I continue to believe that the best option is to adjust personal behavior (in the absence of government requirements) to minimize transmission risk (social distancing and universal mask wearing) so that we can buy time for further development of treatments and vaccines. It is our only option if we don’t want to see several times the number of deaths we’ve seen already. We’re still only at the beginning in pandemic time.