Post #911: COVID trends to 12/7/2020, Hawaii is the only bright spot.

Posted on December 8, 2020

This is just an update of my state-level graphs, showing the seven-day moving average of daily new COVID cases, based on the NY Times Github data repository.  The sharp squiggle near the end of many lines is an artifact of data reporting from the Thanksgiving holiday.

True new cases generated by all the socializing and travel at Thanksgiving should only start arriving in the data this week, at the earliest.  So all the existing upward trend you see to this point, in so many states, is all prior to the impact that Thanksgiving may have on new COVID-19 cases.

The Midwest states that had such extreme peaks two weeks ago generally continue to see declining (albeit high) new case counts.  Or maybe stable (but high) new case counts.

Pretty much everywhere else, other than Hawaii, the trend is toward higher case counts.  Outside of the Midwest/Mountain states, only Rhode Island has exceeded 100 new cases/100,000 population/day.  But many states are headed for that level, and (e.g.) Alaska looks like it will exceed that level in a few days.

California has broken away from the other West Coast states.  Without proof, I’d suggest that an exceptionally dry November in most of California may have contributed to that (Post #894).  With their Santa Ana winds, and zero rainfall, Los Angeles had numerous days where the outdoor relative humidity was in the single digits.  So California isn’t cold, but it’s surely got dry indoor air.  (By contrast, e.g., Both Seattle (WA) and Portland (OR) had significant precipitation, and outdoor relative humidities were typically in the 80%s.  So the Southern California climate was vastly different from the OR and WA climate in November 2020.)  Weather data were summarized from Weather Undergound historical weather data.

National and regional data follow.