With many parts of the United States either ending their stay-at-home orders or about to let them expire, I wanted to do an update to use as a baseline to see how the daily infection rate developed as people began to interact more. To accomplish this, I have created a graph of the United States daily infection rate as well as infection rates for each individual state.
The graphs are made using the same technique I used to make the previous graphs. I took the reported daily infection rates, used a skewed normal graph to calculate the possible date that the infections happened, and plotted the two together on the same graph.
The underlying mathematics are pretty simply and rely mostly on brute force calculations done in a spreadsheet. If anyone is interested in the mathematics or a copy of the spreadsheet, let me know and I will provide them.
As a side note, I won’t be doing much analysis on the individual graphs. I created them mostly to get a visual representation of how the known daily infections were effected by changes in people’s behavior.
A few points to watch out for on each graph:
- Each graph covers the dates from March 1, 2020 through May 1, 2020.
- Each graph has a best-fit y-axis. That makes it easy to see how the infection rate progresses, but can be confusing if not taken into account when comparing different states.
- There should never be a negative daily infection rate reported, but some states like Nevada have done this several times. It is possible that those states aren’t reporting their numbers accurately and actually have higher rates reported than they are releasing.
Marisa Burnes (dot) com 