This post updates some key graphs to 6/22/2020. I think, given the national context, I have to switch from complaining that we haven’t beaten COVID-19 back yet in Virginia, to being thankful that Virginia remains place of stability in an otherwise volatile US scene.
Anyway, not much has changed. And in this context, that’s a good thing. Virginia continues to get under 500 new cases a day, Fairfax under 100, and Vienna 22180 seems to be getting about one new case per day.
You have to wonder how we can go through re-opening with no apparent impact, but elsewhere, not so. As far as anybody can tell, all it takes is obeying Japan’s Three C’s, plus maybe a fourth C (cocktails) for drinking. If you go to fill-in-the-blank, and it’s crowded, or crowded with people not wearing masks, or crowded with such people eating and drinking — don’t go in. That’s not rocket science. But apparently that’s too complicated for residents of many other states. Let’s hope that it doesn’t reach that point for Virginia.
Vienna, VA, updated to 6/22/2020. Ticking along at a case a day or so, in 22180.
I’d like to attribute this to our personal virtue, but given the high incomes, low historical infection rate, and low Latino population in Vienna, this is about where we ought to be. We’re fortunate, for sure, but given my last posting, I would not go so far as to say that we’ve earned it.
Daily new cases, Virginia and Fairfax County, last 28 days, update to 6/22/2020. Slower case growth plateaus, does not continue to fall even lower. If I were a even more of a pessimist than I normally am, I might even say ticks up a tad. By eye.
In this period of relative calm, maybe now is the time for the Commonwealth, or Fairfax County, to start asking where these new cases are coming from, and what they can do to stamp them out. Fairfax needs to asks why this disease is so burdensome for (e.g.) Latinos in Sterling, VA (Post #727). You have dozens and dozens of new cases. Surely someone can ask if there is there anything in common about where they work, what they do, how they appear to have picked up the disease? And in particular, is there anything you could change about that, so that they don’t?
Given what’s going on in the rest of the country, let’s use this time to make some progress. Let’s not just sit back and see if it gets better on its own.
Analysis of Virginia re-opening, updated to 6/22/2020. All quiet. The rest of the state (outside of NoVA, Richmond City, Accomack County) entered Phase II of re-opening on 6/5/2020. Given a (typical, estimated) 10-ish day lag for new infections to show up in the system, we’re well pas the point where we’d be seeing that, if there were any. So far as good.
Virginia in the context of other states: A misery index. This last one is a map based on a table of the states that I first set up in Post #716. You can read that post to see how I derived my “misery index”, but in a nutshell, it’s an estimate of how fast infection is spreading in an area, on a per-capita basis, combined with how that rate of spread has changed recently.
These maps have the same color scale, with the palest red being a recent growth rate of zero, and the deepest red (not shown) being 20%. (Those are annualized new COVID-19 case counts based on the most recent two weeks of data — see prior post to see how that’s defined, exactly). Ignore Hawaii and DC — I use dummy values for those areas to keep the color scheme the same from map to map.
Anyway, redder = worse. Here’s the map from a week ago, and one from today. The US as a whole got a bit redder last week, by eye. Arizona stands out with both a high current new-case count (per capita) and a steep rate of increase in that count over the past two weeks. Virginia got a bit redder not because our new infection counts went up, but because last week, they were falling, and this week, they stayed the same.
