Current State Trends

It is hard to compare what is happening with COVID-19 in different states right now. In part, that is because states are reporting their data differently, on different days of the week and in different ways.

For example, Sue Campbell points out the Illinois is now counting “probable cases” and not just PCR confirmed infections in their totals. This will provide for a one time jump in numbers, but won’t change trends going forward. Other states are changing reporting in various ways, but again the trends are not altered after these changes.

One site, http://www.covidexitstrategy.org, is trying to standardize the state by state numbers and the different responses. Their current assessment is interesting, but not very illuminating. As shown below, they feel that only Vermont is trending better in terms of its COVID-19 control, while 42 of the states have uncontrolled spread and another 6 are trending poorly.

So this assessment uses criteria based on CDC and COVID-19 task force . It shows how non-discriminatory these measures are when evaluating the infectious activity of these states.

Two additional measures can be used to evaluate the infectious activity across the 50 states. Rt numbers also suggest a diffuse increase in infection activity across the states. However, this is does show a significant variation between states, from 1.0 for Kentucky to 1.5 for Maine.

In contrast, trend data from Johns Hopkins show that several stares are responsible for the majority of the increase in the country, with the center of the country leading the way. It is not clear why this divergence is present, but in some ways it depends on how you cut the data.

All together, this information suggests that there is an overall increase in infections, one that has created a third peak of infections, but it still is focused in a subset of states.