Seven States?

As the Covid19 spikes continued over the weekend, setting new records for Most Daily in any state, highest percentage increase, etc. I thought that it might be useful to think about the Pareto Principle.  You may know it as the 80-20 rule, wherein 20% of the {places, events, things, people} create 80% of the changes.   This happens in all sorts of arenas--20% of a baseball team's hitters account for 80% of the home-runs; 20% of the touring golf pros win 80% of the tournaments; 20% of your stock picks will have 80% of the gains (or losses, either one).

So it is with Covid, although I used a slightly modified metric.   I used seven states, the TOP SEVEN, for three different test intervals. 

The first interval is the long one--from Day 1 to this weekend, 24 weeks of unremitting bad news. 

The second interval is from when the President first sought to OPEN America, the week of March 21 when just a handful of bad news was already alarming the country.  Recall his statement of March 24, when he said it'd be BEAUTIFUL if we could open the country's churches by Easter, April 12.  For this interval, I selected six weeks, going from March 21 through May 1.   This was the peak time for the Northeast outbreaks, especially in New York and New Jersey, but also Massachusetts, Delaware, and Connecticut.

The third interval is NOW, the five weeks from June 6 through July10.   The big news, of course, are states like Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California.   And now, Florida is surpassing New York for infection rates, and their death-rate continues to climb.

So I thought it'd be worth looking at WHO, HOW MUCH, and WHEN these statistics have amassed.

Chart 1 is for the whole year to date.  Look at these numbers--7 states account for half of the Cases, but 24 states have more than 1,000 deaths, and 43 states have more than 300 per capita cases.  Whew!  In other words, this ha been a WIDESPREAD swath across the entire country.


The "early window" shows an uneven pattern, mostly affecting the Northeast (as was well advertised on the television channels) but on a per capita basis, it afflicted the Great Plains and the upper Midwest (the Colorado, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa impacts were never broadly discussed, by comparison with Illinois and Michigan and Pennsylvania).


The most recent time-frame shows also an interesting pattern, if you dig deeper than the TV spots.  Bet you didn't hear much about Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Iowa during this interval, but they were as bad or worse than California or Georgia for example.  Why is it we go for "the big numbers" but not the meaningful statistics, like how many people 'here' are affected.  As a small example, in other posts, I've looked at the local agricultural counties, which in California are 3 of the top four 'killer' counties (out of 58), and 4 of the top 7 in total cases per capita.