(I asked this question before buried in another thread, I think it deserves a thread of its own, and I am hoping for factual answers). NPR publishes this map every day. The time covered is for a rolling of 7 consecutive days, where the most recent day is a few days before. (Note: the subject of the article is whether you need to wear a mask indoors, but that is not the subject of this thread.)
From the article:
The data for this map comes from the CDC. The color-coding is based on two metrics: the number of new cases per 100,000 residents and the percentage of coronavirus tests that come back positive in a seven-day period. (snip)
If those two metrics show different levels of transmission in a given place, the CDC selects the higher level.
So let’s look at these two statistics. Number of new cases per 100,000 residents is a fairly straightforward calculation.
Percentage of Covid tests taken that come back positive: given the same number of new positive cases, if a lot of tests are taken that could skew the percentage down, and if few tests are taken that could skew the percentage up.
Out of this information, I am unable to come with any scenario that does not include a general lower rate of new infections, especially when a county’s status is based on the worse of the two statistics.
So either the deep South is not the epicenter of maskholes, anti-testing and anti-vaxxers as I (at least) thought, or else masks and vaccines are not effective overall in reducing new Covid cases (or possibly both of course).
I know that statistics can be subtle and tricky, but I can’t see my way through this puzzle. I’m hoping someone smarter than me (and your numbers are legion) can point out what is going on here.
I’ve always had trouble drawing conclusions from the testing statistics, they seem to be dependent on so many factors, such as how many people -sick or not- choose to get tested and I’m never sure how they handle the test results from people that jobs that require them to test frequently.
But if you look at the per capita death rate per 100,000, it looks like the Deep South was hit particularly hard.
6 of the top 10 states are what I would consider Deep South - 8 if you consider Florida and Oklahoma to be Deep South. The two outliers are New York and New Jersey, and I suspect that’s because
They got hit early
It’s really hard to socially distance in a high density urban area where most people live in apartments and take mass transit.
I’ve found the pet capita death rate to be the most useful statistic. It’s hard to say what percentage of the population has been infected, as I suspect lots of people with mild or even moderate cases requiring hospitalization never got tested.
It appears that the map you are referencing is only the current slice in time. But that’s after delta had been raging through the South, taking our numbers above their original peaks from previous waves. We got above January numbers in many places, including both my state and my general area.
According to other Dopers, this is a repeated pattern with delta. It hits hard with its higher infection rate, but seems to burn itself out more easily. It runs out of people to infect more quickly than the original version. Perhaps more people getting sick means more people isolate. Plus, if people are at all like they are in my area, the huge spikes scared the more vulnerable into getting vaccinated, helping stop it even sooner.
It seems that the good but not great vaccination numbers of the rest of the country have smoothed out and delayed the spike, but not completely stopped it from occurring, so now you’re seeing higher numbers in the rest of the country.
Do note that the South is also generally more rural, and rural people are still better protecting by social distancing, though there is the caveat that we’re likely to wind up gathering more into the same spaces. For example, everyone may live rather far apart but wind up all going to the same grocery store or Walmart. Still, those numbers aren’t at the level that they are in urban areas. This innate social distancing is likely what kept pre-delta rural numbers lower, and goes a long way in those people thinking COVID wasn’t a big deal.
But note that these attitudes are rural, not Southern. Don’t forget that there are a lot more red people in blue states than there are in red states, simply because blue states are more urban, and thus have more people, period. There are more Republicans in California than in Texas. So there are going to be clusters of lower vaccination up there, too. And do note that no one has gotten to anywhere near herd immunity levels to keep the virus from spreading at all once it gets a foothold in those states.
I particularly didn’t want to look at death rate. Masks have no effect on death rate per se, unlike vaccination. Also it’s not that I want the South to suffer, I want to understand how these results could come about.
You make a good point about people whose jobs require them to get tested frequently. If it is unlikely for very many types of jobs to have this requirement in the south, it may be mostly limited to health workers. Supposing two things, that health workers will get far fewer new cases per test, and that the general population is getting tested less than other areas, that would skew that positivity rate statistic downwards. But if the actual new cases per 100,000 were still relatively high, then those counties would still show a high transmission rate (as a deeper or redder color on the map). And there isn’t any way to skew that statistic.
For the rest of the country, if we assume more people are getting tested, their positivity rate should be lower, not higher.
I appreciate your point, sort of (and I remember that you brought it up in the other thread). What it boils down to is that the Covid transmission rate currently really is lower, because so many people have already had it? (Whether they died or survived, they would not be getting another new case.) It would be interesting to be able to apply actual numbers to that.
As for rural vs. urban, look at all those flyover states, many of them with huge areas of very sparse population, plus generally conservative populations, and they still have high transmission rates. Perhaps they are getting the Delta spike later than the South? Hard to figure.
Yes, of course you’re right. Omit that part. I still didn’t want to talk about death rate because that is just a different kind of statistic, based on different factors, like available medical care.
It’s because the waves have been, and still are, cyclical. There’s also a bit of lax reporting going on. I downloaded the 2+ million row source data and started looking at some of the counties in GA that were considered having low transmission rates. There are times where the positivity rate can jump from 0 to over 50% in a few short days, and then drop right back down to 0%. With 2 million rows, I’m not really blaming the guy gathering the data, but it definitely is pretty messy.
If you really want to look into it, you can click Export on this page and get the entire dataset, including all the historical data. That will allow you to see what’s happening at a far too granular level, quite frankly.
If that’s too much work, then decide on some finer grain of detail you’d like to see and I’ll pop it out into Tableau Public.
And this I don’t understand at all. If available medical care is an issue, it’s likely due to CoVID, so no matter what some data point says about an area, there are too many people currently infected there.
I was thinking of things like baseline numbers of beds and medical people, in case there was any sort of regional difference (which I don’t know). I’m pretty sure it’s not the same everywhere, but how different it is, and in which places, is beyond my knowledge.
I went ahead and loaded a couple to play with, but as I noted early, the data is all sorts of messy. Due to the messiness, I used Median for the aggregations. That means that the state level data is not a sum of all counties, as many counties don’t report daily. It’s the median county numbers for the counties within that state. I also allowed for shrinking the date ranges if you want to see a subset.
State level - This one lets you pick 1 or more states if you want to compare them.
County level - This one lets you pick a state and then pick 1 or more counties for comparison purposes.
One thing that I may be taking for granted is that the South is more rebellious in general. And you had the governors of Florida and Texas seeming to go overboard on the antimask/antivax rhetoric.
I believe there are sites that list the actual vaccination rates over time of different areas. It might be interesting to compare the South to other more rural areas.
I also know that some parts of the midwest are even more rural than the South, so perhaps that helped protect them a bit longer.
What I know for sure is that the science says masks and vaccines work, and that the vaccinated and mask-compliance rates down here are abysmal, and that we’re just coming off a huge surge due to delta. Our calm is coming after a huge storm.
The South just came off a big-ass delta surge that lasted for nearly four months. My southern county had a about a 23% positivity rate in July at the beginning of our surge. As @DMC state, these waves tend to be cyclical for reasons that are not completely understood.
There are tons of articles with data on the trends between blue and red counties that show that blue counties do much better. However, even highly-vaxxed states are not vaxxed enough to stop a surge yet.
And that calm is not lasting. The numbers here (Shelby County TN) started dropping in October and we got down to less than 100 cases a day for a few weeks (which for us is great). Total cases dropped to 900 at the end of October from a high in early September of nearly 10,000. Then the mask mandate was ended the first week of November. Now the numbers are rising again with almost 1300 total cases as of today. With the holidays approaching, I expect January is going to be pretty bleak. Hopefully, though, we won’t see the hospital system overwhelmed like it was in September. But with a 47% total vaccination rate…
Okay, so what I’m taking away from this is that these transmission levels are very cyclical and different areas hit the highs and lows at different times, and the map linked in the OP covers too narrow a range of time to be useful for what I was fretting about.
Other factors mentioned in other responses may have some influence, but I find this explanation the most persuasive.
There might also be reasons why more people are testing in the South. If, for instance, an employer requires all employees to either be vaccinated or to test frequently, then wherever you see people resistant to being vaccinated, you’re going to see more tests being taken. And more tests being taken will lead to a lower positivity rate on those tests.
I’m in the south, although not deep south, and even though I’m trebly vaccinated, two Moderna vaccines last winter (January and February) and a Moderna booster in October, my employer requires a Covid test every 72 hours for me to work. I have dozens, possibly a hundred negative tests in my record, and I only work intermittently.
My suspicion is that it’s the cyclical/wave pattern, and a lot of Southern states are just now coming out of a Delta variant surge.
For example, look at my county (scroll down a bit to the graphs), and you’ll see what I’m talking about- it was really bad there for a while in August and September, but it’s dropped off considerably since then, and we’re at roughly the same case rates that we had back in March or thereabouts.
So as a result, it’s not inconceivable that in large part, the Delta variant has essentially ripped through the unvaccinated populations that were exposed, and the case rate will trail off pretty considerably from there because there just aren’t so many people left to infect who are in a position to get infected.