COVID-19 Hotspots Reemerging

 

As I noted earlier this week, public health experts are concerned that a new wave of infections may be hitting the U.S., and that hotspots are reemerging.  I wanted to look into this further so I went to see what information the CDC has on offer.

I found exactly what I was looking for in the Community Profile Report. It's a data geek's wet dream of maps showing every conceivable measure by county, and how those measures have changed over the last seven days.

They present one map, the "area of concern continuum by county."  It boils down all the indicators—new cases, positive tests, deaths, hospitalizations, etc.—to "describe communities as they progress through stages of the epidemic." 

Here is the map for March 16:

Congratulations to Kansas.  Also, the report notes that Missouri just dumped a bunch of backlog data, making it look worse than it is.  

Otherwise most states have some problem areas.  Of particular concern are the hotspots in the New York City area, and in Michigan's Lower Peninsula.  The latter is also flagged in another map in the report called "rapid riser counties."

It's interesting to compare the CDC map to the map of percent of population fully vaccinated from Johns Hopkins:

Here both Michigan and New York are at the lower end of the scale. So are other states with red marks in high population areas.  

Florida, whose governor has been bragging about what a great job he's done with the pandemic, is a sea of red in the CDC map and at the low end on the vaccination map. That's also where unmasked young spring-breakers have been packing restaurants and beaches and generally acting like there is no pandemic. Will they take Florida virus home with them and set off new hotspots?

Anyway, it's nice to see an apparent relationship between these two maps (Kansas is an exception), but worrisome that we are seeing the reemergence of hotspots. This validates the idea that it's going to be a race between variants and vaccines.

Header Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay 

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