I was looking at COVID-19 data that was sorted by case count and noticed that the Dakotas and Wisconsin were at the top of the list and then looked a column over and realized that all those regions still had low deaths per 1000 people. It made me curious about how common it is to have a high-deaths region.
So I built a histogram of all the counties in the U.S. and binned them by their deaths per 1000 persons. Just as a reminder, the height of the bar represents the number of counties in the bin. For instance, the tall bar on the far left represents about 500 counties all of which have less than about 0.1 deaths per 1000 persons. The really short bars on the far right represent the one or two counties with over 3.0 deaths per 1000 persons (0.3%).
I put labels on the histogram to identify which bars well-known counties fall in (yes, it’s biased towards Arizona).
Yes, the NYC boroughs (Queens, Bronx, Manhattan) all are still at the top of the list, but their death rates have slowed significantly from the peak rates back in March/April.
Also, the red line represents the exponential function that fits the decay of the histogram. Therefore, the likelihood of a county having a large death rate follows an exponential decay. The formula would be DECAY RATE = 432*e^(-2.5) + 4.3