FAaFO

Yesterday's post compared the surge in the U.S. as a whole to what's going on in the U.K. 

Adrienne Martini quite reasonably noted that this is probably playing out differently in different states, since our vaccination rates are so different: in Vermont it's 75%/67% (at least one dose / fully vaccinated), while in Alabama it's 38%/34%.

(The data n vaccination are from covidactnow.org.)

So I assembled a not-totally-random collection of states with varying vaccination rates and looked at their current covid increases.

The lines are color-shaded, with pure red being the lowest vaccination rate and blue being the highest. Florida's 56% with one dose matches the national average, so it has the central shading of gray.

The states are also listed in the legend in order of vaccination rate, from worst to best.

As with yesterday's post, the daily case rates are from Worldometers, 7-day averages, read weekly.

Not surprisingly, the redder lines of the unvaccinated states:

• Start up earlier;
• Didn't get as low before starting up; and
• Are now at significantly higher levels.

But Florida, with the national average vaccination rate, is doing much worse than Mississippi and Alabama, the two least vaccinated states.

Lining up the starting times of every state's increase, you see again the rough pattern that more vaccinated states reached lower lows of infection rates and haven't been rising for as long - but again: Florida ...

The most troubling news for the blue states with higher vaccination rates is that, although we got our rates lower and held off the increase longer, we're now increasing faster than the redder states were at a comparable point in their increases:

(Though note that Vermont is only a little more than two weeks past its low, and with such a small population, it's easy for it to have "noisy" numbers. It will be "interesting" to see how this shakes out in a couple more weeks.)

Bringing the UK into the mix, we can see that none of these nine states is (yet) as bad off as the UK, though that's not saying much, because the earliest of them is still four weeks behind the UK in terms of how long they've been experiencing an increase. 

Lining up the beginnings of everyone's increase, we can see that almost every US state in the sample is above the UK line, which forms sort of an "envelope" below the US lines. Most states didnt get their cases as low, and it looks like they've been increasing faster.

That is clearer to see when we focus in on just the first seven weeks, the length of the longest US increases.

(In transferring from Excel, this chart is somehow losing two labels from its legend. As in the other charts, the all-blue solid line is Vermont, and the black dashed line is UK.)

Adding the UK to the chart of growth, we see the envelope phenomenon more clearly - every US state in the sample has its case rates growing at least as fast as what the UK saw at the comparable point in its surge:

Again focusing in on the first eight weeks:

Missouri is kind of playing footsie with the UK line over the last few weeks, and Texas is pretty close. Everyone else is noticeably above.

I think it's time for masks back on in stores, etc. I'm wondering if in-person restaurants are a good idea.

Tempering that is the very low rate of serious illness among vaccinated people.

Un-tempering that is the way that increased infection rates increase the rate at which new variants arise, giving us higher odds of encountering a version that really cares very little about your vaccination status.

(A note about Texas: it's a little hard to pick the right point for Texas's "low," because they went along a low plateau for several weeks, with transient lows within that. For yesterday's and today's posts I've chosen June 17th, as the last low point before a sustained rise.)

What failure looks like

 In case you were wondering (and you know you were), this is what failure looks like:

Figure 1

Allow me to explain.

The UK reached its low in daily new covid-19 cases back on May 5th. The U.S. reached its low back on June 21st.

This is what the two countries' experiences have been in the time since each one's low:

Figure 2

(As the labeling on the chart indicates, the data are from Worldometers. I don't know if there's a way of downloading their data, so instead I set it to show me the 7-day average of new cases, found each country's low point, and then manually found and typed up the values. To save time, I picked up the values ever week rather than every day.)

This graph has two problems in terms of comparing the countries: the action isn't happening at the same time, and the U.S. is substantially bigger than the UK, so we expect to see higher numbers here, even for an equal severity.