This post updates some key graphs to 6/27/2020. Upshot: No material change in the situation in Virginia. Virginia continues to get around 500 new cases a day, Fairfax seems to be averaging just over 50, and Vienna 22180 seems to be getting well under one new case per day, on average.
No upticks from re-opening appear in the data so far, for Virginia. In the national context, Virginia is squarely in the middle of the pack in terms of new cases per capita. Not getting worse, but not getting better, either.
Vienna, VA, updated to 6/26/2020 (yesterday). Net of 2 additional cases in the last seven days in ZIP 22180.
Daily new cases, Virginia and Fairfax County, last 28 days, update to 6/27/2020. Slower case growth plateaus, does not continue to fall even lower.
Analysis of Virginia re-opening, updated to 6/27/2020. 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. The US got redder last week, and Arizona just about maxes out the scale.
I have an easier time dealing with the numbers, rather than the graph. Here’s the table of numbers underlying the last map. I have reset the DC and Hawaii values to their correct values for this table. Virginia (green) is squarely in the middle of the pack.
My only back-of-the-envelope observation is that you have to go pretty far down the list before you hit a state that doesn’t have fairly hot summer temperatures. Open bars and restaurants, and nowhere to go but inside, seems to be the current recipe for spreading coronavirus. Let’s hope we have the weather and the good sense to avoid that in Virginia.
Finally, just to put this in perspective, things in Arizona today are just about as dire-looking as they were at the peak of the epidemic in New York state. Here’s this same “misery index” number (last week’s per-capita new cases, annualized, plus the change in that from two weeks back, to last week). It compares Arizona, New York, and Virginia. Things never really got that bad in Virginia.
