Week 18: What is happening in North America?

                                                                                         

 

 

Total Cases     

Cases/M   

Daily cases    

Total deaths    

Deaths/M    

Daily deaths

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

USA

3.5M               

10.370         

67,719           

137,419

415

953

Brazil

1.97M

9,065

39,924

75,366

354

1,233

UK

0.29M

4,290

538

45,053

663

85

Canada

0.19M

2.874

341

8,810

233

12

Mexico

0.32M 

2,415

6,149

36,906

286

579

 


Brazil and the UK included for comparison purposes

(Data for July 15th)



Of these measures, total cases and total deaths are heavily influenced by the size of the populations, but not the rates per million at risk.  The daily rates for both cases and deaths will be higher in states with larger total populations.

 

It is my unwelcome duty to draw attention to the fact that the UK now has a rate for deaths/M that is well in excess of all other parts of the world, reflecting the too little and too late policies that have been repeatedly addressed in previous blogs.

 

Brazil has rightly been concentrated upon in previous blogs, but has not beaten  the US in their gloomy competition to find which country can have the most depressing and out of touch leadership in a crisis. The  rates for New Cases has now been won by the US, and everything points to a new surge in cases that will eventually be reflected in even worse death rates. The second surge is now upon us: but how do these states with really low rates manage to avoid these things completely?

 

Within the United States, Case rates vary considerably from one state to another. If correction is made for the different numbers of people in each state, then rates per million in those states that used a test to confirm cases range from higher prevalence states on the left, to states with lower rates on the right. (States that used tests, but are intermediate between these two extremes have been omitted).

 

New York City:

25,813/M

Wyoming

2,927/M

Arizona:

16,645/M     

Maine

2,377/M

Massachusetts:

14,538/M

Montana

2,033/M

Virginia:

8,290/M

Wisconsin

147/M

Michigan:

7,037/M

Kentucky

137/M

                                                  

 

What do we know about the possible causes of these huge differences?

 

It is easy to see that the population of NYC will be more closely packed together than those of Wisconsin or Kentucky, and will have more people arriving and leaving with time. We know very little about the age structure, ethnic mix or mean earnings in each state. How about the super-rich, making their contribution both to available cash, and undoubted inequalities between haves and have-nots?  What do we know about the quality of life in the different states, the inequality between different parts of town, and even the relative differences between rural and urban living?

 

These are not questions that an elderly Englishman who has not visited the USA for some years can readily address, but I can live in hopes that such huge differences will be addressed by my friends who still live in the US will engage with..

 

Come on, Americans – let’s have some comments!

 

David Goldberg

July 16th 2020,  and still no real prospect of getting out of  here

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 6

This will be the week when courageous countries try taking the brakes off. We will wait to see what such Trumpian procedures achieve for them. Austria, Denmark and Czechia are all wondering which brake to remove.   Problem 1:   Let’s start with some countries which appear to be on a descending path of prevalence,   they will have longer values for the number of days to double prevalence, and all have fewer than one death /day, /million at risk. They have a range of different climates, with one in Europe, two the other side of the world, and one very hot.                                             Australia              NZ             ...
Read more

Week 10 - Where do we go from here? Should we be just a little flexible?

At present, we seem to be at a cross-roads. Either governments should have a single policy for their entire country,   or they might be some advantages in having a flexible policy, treating some parts of a country differently from others.   Have conditions been satisfied to begin to release the lockdown?   Most European countries (UK, Italy, Spain and France) are nervously emerging from lockdown after experiencing very high levels of Covid-19 cases. The reasons that politicians are keen to relax the lockdown as soon as possible are that the economic costs of the lockdown are huge, and we are likely to move into a recession.   They may possibly be hoping, as ours seems to be, that just bringing their R number below 1 will somehow, magically, make the virus disappear. But in countries that have experienced such high prevalence, if a vaccine proves impossible, and if anti-viral treatments are only partially effective, it seems more likely tha...
Read more

Week 12 - What will happen next? Super Spreader Events (SSEs)

Most previous blogs have largely relied on published work, but in order to cover the immense number of papers on Covid-19 this blog includes papers that have not been accepted for publication but are sponsored by Wellcome Open research   SSE’s can either apply to a cataclysmic event, with several people involved, or to an individual who has infected several people. The old idea, that single people passed infection on to single people, went out some time ago. We now have the 20/80 model, where 20% of the population are potential superspreaders , and they spread the virus to people who were near them at the time of the SSE. So, an SSE at a religious service will affect individuals who were at the same service, at a football match the new cases will be among those who were at that match, and so on. The new cases will be just as infectious as anyone else who is positive for the virus.   A recent example of an SSE When 61 people met for a choir pract...
Read more