While it is nice to see the overall picture of the Covid-19 outbreak in the United States as well as being able to see how the individual states are doing, that leaves the question of where the real outbreaks are located.
The Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University publishes data daily on their GitHub page. The data is broken down to the county level. All that remained was for me to go through the data and see which individual counties were having the largest outbreaks.
So how did I determine who was having the largest outbreak? I used two criteria.
The first criteria was that there had to be more than a 19% growth rate over the last week. That served to eliminate random spikes in reported infection rates due to returning test results. Also, while 19% is a fairly high growth rate, it is more indicative of unrestrained growth instead of being the result of constant testing.
The second criteria was that there needed to be a minimum of 50 new infections reported over the previous week. This served to help remove false positives showing large growth rates from the list that resulted from very small numbers of infections. For example, a county that moved from 2 reported cases to 4 reported cases in one week would show as a staggering 200% growth rate, but that doesn’t indicate an outbreak as far as I’m concerned.
What do those two criteria leave out? The most obvious places that would be left out were places like New York where they still have large numbers of infections but they have their growth rate under control. Other places that were left out were counties that have few infections to date but are rapidly growing.
Remember: there are very few places in the United States that remain untouched by Covid-19. And for those places that remain untouched, they are within a leisurely driving distance from a place where they can become infected.
With those criteria in mind, here are where the outbreaks are currently happening in the United States.
Continue reading May 13, 2020 update — U.S. Counties with Covid-19 Outbreaks
Marisa Burnes (dot) com 