counties vs cities

 People have asked, "What about MY town?" when they first visit our Covid19 Dashboard  https://anywhereanytime.io/covid19/    

Well, unfortunately, that is pretty hard to do.   In fact, just doing the 3,142 counties of America daily for four variables, and calculating the 7 day moving average for each variable while we're at it, is a task.

But, people persist, so I did several experiments in recent times; I'll share some in the next few posts.   

A. I did "Our County" since all of our neighbors and friends here keep asking.   I'm showing that today.

B. I did 8 counties around our old farmstead in Iowa, which I mentioned in the post yesterday

C. I did Santa Barbara County, seeking to help answer the question "Should UCSB open this fall?"

D. I couldn't help myself, because I lived many years in Southern California, and I hear so often "What's wrong in LA (or Riverside, or Orange County, or ....)?"   I'll treat Los Angeles County in the next post.  This is actually an amazing story.   LA County is 10 million people, in 88 incorporated towns and cities. Los Angeles City is almost 4 million of those 10 million folk, divided into 140 Districts and 133 listed Unincorporated Areas.    And the County Health Dept publishes Confirmed Cases and Deaths and rates for each for every one of the 361 areas.    So you can actually find out a lot.   Cook County (Chicago and 127 municipalities) has a great website for each township as well, in fact better than LA because they have lots of graphs for each township, that show trends, etc.

E. I have long been a member of the Fellowship Forum in Palo Alto, a group of 55  honorees (honored partly for their geriatric mobility) who have met weekly for lunch and a topical presentation.  Covid has stopped the lunches, but permitted me to attend again from 'far away'.   And when Stanford canceled all in-class instruction (except for the Business School) yesterday, I thought, "Why not Santa Clara County?"  Or maybe the next door San Mateo County.

The key variable to understand is that not all cities report their data, but sometimes the County Health Dept steps in and does so for them.   In Tulare County, they publish a pseudo-map, abetted by others, that somewhat inaccurately, but at least suggestively, shows what each town is experiencing.

So here is a map from August 2 that shows a Confirmed Cases number beside each town and/or zip code.   I added the current estimated population, and calculated the per capita Cases/100K number.

Just for reference, 5,000 caess per capita translates into one of every 20 people in that town have been confirmed.   If you believe the CDC estimate that for every KNOWN case, there are 10 untested--that suggests that one of every two people in a town with confirmed 5,000 cases per capita have Covid.  Those estimates were early; I like the current estimates of 45% of total cases are unidentified.   That says only one out of ten citizens in towns with 5,000 confirmed cases are affected.

WOW!   One out of ten?   That's like one in every two or three homes around here.   Here's the data:

So, pretty clearly you don't want to live in Dinuba or Earlimart or Pixley.   We live 'near' Woodlake and Exeter, one of the better situations.   Visalia is our "big town" a little more than 130,000 folk.    And using the 45% estimate, ONLY one of every 25 residents there has/had Covid.   One out of 25?  Whew