Where are the cases/deaths and the hotspots in the US?
The above chart shows that the United States follows the trends of the rest of the world regarding zones where the highest numbers of cases and deaths are occurring. The table with the data for this graph is below.
What do we see here? The band from 40 to 45 degrees North latitude has over 3x the number of COVID-19 Cases and pretty close to 5x the number of COVID-19 deaths than the next highest 5 degree latitude band. Regions in this band include NYC, Philly, Detroit, and Chicago, all harder-hit localities. With this region, the US has around 4.0 Cases per 1000 people. Remove this region and it drops to about 1.5 Cases per 1000 people. The former number places us 10th in the world by cases per 1000 and the latter number places us around 40th. So you can see this one 5 degree band makes a very big difference in our case numbers. It has an even more pronounced affect on the death numbers.
I also note that the slope (today’s rate) of the 40-45 band leads the pack but that 35-40 is catching up. No other region is close on this case (and death) growth measure. See below for a graph… This is a picture of “hot-spots”, i.e., regions with more rapid increases.
Fortunately in the harder hit regions, we’re seeing many of the growth rates slowing down (decelerating). Below are regions that have case numbers that are accelerating the fastest. Note that some of these are outside that hard-hit Northeast corridor. Also note that most of these ‘accelerating’ regions still have low case numbers (their case growth is just starting). And the measure we really care about (deaths) is still very low in these regions. As testing increases, this is a trend I’m seeing more… high numbers of cases and low numbers of deaths. Just something to watch.
