How is the US COVID situation right now?
Looking back at historic data
Figuring out COVID severity on a community isn’t a simple operation. There are many dimensions metrics to possibly consider, from case rates and vaccinations, to hospitalizations and testing. Despite everyone acclimating to remote or hybrid work, festivities, and general life, certain regions of COVID-19 data have hit a second childhood.
In the early days of the pandemic, data reporting pipelines weren’t yet established, and the CDC directed to third party sources for county-level data. One of the most reliably updated datasets was crowdsourced to fill the gap. Efforts are split across multiple fronts (vaccination, testing, contact tracing, etc.) and as communities have re-opened, some resources previously dedicated to COVID have returned to their normal functions — here in Chicago a community movie theater turned COVID testing site is now screening flicks again.
As data quality has again become an issue, some projects have stopped collecting new data, or do so on a slower timeline. State and county reporting makes a huge difference — here’s what the timeline looks like from Florida — notice those stepped lines starting around June? That’s the switch from daily updates to weekly information.
So, how can we at least get a sense of where we are, and where we are going? One of the ways I’ve been using the US Covid Atlas, a project I’ve been working on with the Health Regions and Policies Lab at UChicago, is to look at a particular county’s historic data and ask where we are now relative to case trends in the past. If I can get a sense of the severity in relation to where we’ve been, I can start to think about how I moderated risk then, and how I can consider my risk budget now. It’s important to remember that vaccinations fundamentally change the situation, and they remain the most important step to curbing the spread of COVID. Say it with me, one more time — help 👏 get 👏 all 👏 people 👏 vaccinated!
Let’s dive in. Here’s the cases trend for Cook County, Illinois — home to Chicago and yours truly:
The yellow line represents new cases each week, scaled to cases per 100,000 people. The white line is the total number of cases the county has seen, again per 100,000 people. Hovering over the chart shows you information for that particular date, and the toggles below enable raw numbers or population-scaled numbers, and a log scale, if you prefer it.
To get this view, simply go to USCovidAtlas.org and click on a county! While you’d need more sophisticated modeling to get a really deep understanding of the changes over time, we can visually observe where the data is, generally where the trend is heading, and how this relates to previous COVID spikes. In Cook County, where we are now looks somewhat similar to the April-June 2021 line.
Let’s say you want to look at multiple counties, maybe five of the biggest counties in the US. Hold down control on your keyboard while clicking, and you can select multiple counties:
Selecting Los Angeles County, Harris (Houston) TX, Maricopa AZ, and Miami-Dade FL, we can see how different waves of COVID impacted different counties. Especially early on, counties had major COVID spikes out of sync, and we still see scales of the pandemic differing. If you live in an area with multiple counties grouped together, or commute between them, you could select these counties to see what is the same and what is different in terms of cases changing over time. This doesn’t give you the full picture, but it can help orient you to where we are, and where we might be going.
The COVID-19 situation continues to evolve in the US, with more concerns and complexity than this blog post can mention. I urge you to keep up with local, state, and federal recommendations and keep up with them as much as possible. Get vaccinated if you haven’t yet. Be careful and be kind to your community, neighbors, and people wherever you live.
