6 ms·

Middle America is still racking up a ton of new coronavirus cases

12 points by hhs 6y ago

stolenmerch 6y ago
So is the South, much of the Northeast, California, Alaska, and a good bit of the rest of the country.
- listless 6y ago
  That’s exactly what I thought. The whole of the country looks like an unmitigated virus failure. Some states are worse off, but only a fraction look positive. Not sure why Axios feels the need to try and pin the whole thing on the Midwest.
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    Such incredibly bad timing, too, with the vaccine coming ASAP. If we had delayed the second (third?) wave a couple more months or flattened its peak a little bit the vaccine would have saved us.
    - ardy42 6y ago
      > Such incredibly bad timing, too, with the vaccine coming ASAP. That just means whoever wants to prove natural herd immunity theory right has to act now, before it's mooted. /s > If we had delayed the second (third?) wave a couple more months or flattened its peak a little bit the vaccine would have saved us. But that kind of success would have proven so many people wrong, people who really want to be right.
  - pmoriarty 6y ago
    "Not sure why Axios feels the need to try and pin the whole thing on the Midwest." How are they doing that exactly?
  - threatofrain 6y ago
    > The whole of the country looks like an unmitigated virus failure. Some states are worse off, but only a fraction look positive. It looks like the big coastal states are about 1.5 to 2x better in terms of cases per capita than the interior states. That's a Big majority of the US population. I would imagine it's also more impactful due to sparser ICU capacity.
  - gumby 6y ago
    > Not sure why Axios feels the need to try and pin the whole thing on the Midwest I didn’t read it that way; I read “previously safer regions are now suffering, and at a greater rate than earlier zones”
    - listless 6y ago
      I was referring to the click bait
konstmonst 6y ago
Looks like China unintentionally found a way to damage the west pretty good. I wounder what will happen with the next Virus for the far east. I wounder if we will we learn from this and what long term changes our society will keep. It amazes me that many people wait for COVID to end, but don't understand, that it will never go away completely.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  It's more a case of humans not respecting animals, animal habitat, and the environment, and modern society not taking public health seriously enough. It's pretty much the whole world that got screwed by this, and China itself hasn't exactly escaped unscathed.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - emerged 6y ago
    I don’t mean to pile on China, but these things are a product of statistics. If you have a very large number of people culturally treating animals a certain way, the odds become high you’ll occasionally produce a virus like this. It isn’t a problem only applicable to China, but the scale of the problem there dwarves most of the rest of the planet and ultimately needs to be addressed one way or another.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > It's pretty much the whole world that got screwed by this, and China itself hasn't exactly escaped unscathed. But authoritarian China has done far, far better than most of the rest of the world (and especially better than the US, the supposed standard-bearer of liberty and freedom). If you actually care about liberty, one of your priorities should be making sure it actually performs better than the alternatives. Acting foolishly and using liberty as an excuse just soils the reputation of the latter. If that pattern continues, I expect liberty will end up on the retreat worldwide. I'm not so sure the cold war would have turned out the way it did, if the USSR, for all its oppression, managed to consistently provide comparable or superior material living standards to its citizens. It certainly wouldn't have had such a problem with defectors.
ajay-b 6y ago
Possibly because many people associate Midwest with conservative, fly over states. it’s possible Axios is just trying to stoke political animosity.
tzs 6y ago
What I've seen is a good explanation for is why so many low population counties are doing so badly. Take South Dakota. South Dakota has 19 (out of 66) counties with daily cases per 100k over 100. Here are their populations in units of 1000 people: 5.9, 2.8, 7.1, 1.9, 23, 2.1, 5.4, 5.4, 5.4, 28, 9.3, 6.4, 2.9, 2.9, 2.2, 2.2, 4.4, 3.8, 8.4. The first 5 of those have daily cases over 150 (and the top 3 are 560, 244, 217). 57 counties have daily cases over 50. One county (population 0.9k) has 0. Here are the rest under 50: 20.8, 24.0, 25.6, 31.3, 31.9, 43.0, 44.8, 49.7. Populations in k are 1.4, 2.4, 1.3, 3.2, 6.7, 4.2, 5.6, 2.3. Their biggest counties are in the middle. The 10 counties with population of 20k or more have daily cases of 99.4, 87.4, 84.8, 85.7, 64.8, 71.6, 123.9, 90.1, 189.1, and 68.6. (Populations in k: 190, 110, 61, 39, 35, 28, 28, 26, 23, 20). Compare to Washington (picked because I live there, so use it as a reference). We've got 9 counties under 20 new cases per 100k, 17 from 20 to 50, and 13 from 50 to 94.1. Our biggest counties (pop. in k: 2300, 900, 820) have daily cases of 22.5, 34.9, and 31.1. I'm in a county with 270k people, and we are hitting new highs now of 19.6 daily cases per 100k, which would make us the second best county in the state if we were in South Dakota. Rural areas are supposed to be where you go to escape a pandemic. How do you turn rural areas into places that are hardest hit?
- jrs235 6y ago
  > How do you turn rural areas into places that are hardest hit? By acting like it isn't a big deal and not taking it seriously at all and therefore taking little to no precautions.
  - stolenmerch 6y ago
    That's largely not true. Most of these states have similar restrictions and mask mandates and public compliance as the rest of the country. California is doing no better than Iowa right now. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-map-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-ma...
- stolenmerch 6y ago
  It also depends on what metric is used to determine "hardest hit". ICU headroom used in Washington is about the same or higher than many states in Middle America.
imbnwa 6y ago
I can tell you that people stomp around outside in Chicago's gentried neighborhoods with no mask at a 50/50 clip from the naked eye, particularly in the daytime for some reason.

12 points by hhs 6y ago

stolenmerch 6y ago

So is the South, much of the Northeast, California, Alaska, and a good bit of the rest of the country.

listless 6y ago
That’s exactly what I thought. The whole of the country looks like an unmitigated virus failure. Some states are worse off, but only a fraction look positive. Not sure why Axios feels the need to try and pin the whole thing on the Midwest.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  Such incredibly bad timing, too, with the vaccine coming ASAP. If we had delayed the second (third?) wave a couple more months or flattened its peak a little bit the vaccine would have saved us.
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > Such incredibly bad timing, too, with the vaccine coming ASAP. That just means whoever wants to prove natural herd immunity theory right has to act now, before it's mooted. /s > If we had delayed the second (third?) wave a couple more months or flattened its peak a little bit the vaccine would have saved us. But that kind of success would have proven so many people wrong, people who really want to be right.
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  "Not sure why Axios feels the need to try and pin the whole thing on the Midwest." How are they doing that exactly?
- threatofrain 6y ago
  > The whole of the country looks like an unmitigated virus failure. Some states are worse off, but only a fraction look positive. It looks like the big coastal states are about 1.5 to 2x better in terms of cases per capita than the interior states. That's a Big majority of the US population. I would imagine it's also more impactful due to sparser ICU capacity.
- gumby 6y ago
  > Not sure why Axios feels the need to try and pin the whole thing on the Midwest I didn’t read it that way; I read “previously safer regions are now suffering, and at a greater rate than earlier zones”
  - listless 6y ago
    I was referring to the click bait

konstmonst 6y ago

Looks like China unintentionally found a way to damage the west pretty good. I wounder what will happen with the next Virus for the far east. I wounder if we will we learn from this and what long term changes our society will keep. It amazes me that many people wait for COVID to end, but don't understand, that it will never go away completely.

pmoriarty 6y ago
It's more a case of humans not respecting animals, animal habitat, and the environment, and modern society not taking public health seriously enough. It's pretty much the whole world that got screwed by this, and China itself hasn't exactly escaped unscathed.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- emerged 6y ago
  I don’t mean to pile on China, but these things are a product of statistics. If you have a very large number of people culturally treating animals a certain way, the odds become high you’ll occasionally produce a virus like this. It isn’t a problem only applicable to China, but the scale of the problem there dwarves most of the rest of the planet and ultimately needs to be addressed one way or another.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > It's pretty much the whole world that got screwed by this, and China itself hasn't exactly escaped unscathed. But authoritarian China has done far, far better than most of the rest of the world (and especially better than the US, the supposed standard-bearer of liberty and freedom). If you actually care about liberty, one of your priorities should be making sure it actually performs better than the alternatives. Acting foolishly and using liberty as an excuse just soils the reputation of the latter. If that pattern continues, I expect liberty will end up on the retreat worldwide. I'm not so sure the cold war would have turned out the way it did, if the USSR, for all its oppression, managed to consistently provide comparable or superior material living standards to its citizens. It certainly wouldn't have had such a problem with defectors.

ajay-b 6y ago

Possibly because many people associate Midwest with conservative, fly over states. it’s possible Axios is just trying to stoke political animosity.

tzs 6y ago

What I've seen is a good explanation for is why so many low population counties are doing so badly. Take South Dakota. South Dakota has 19 (out of 66) counties with daily cases per 100k over 100. Here are their populations in units of 1000 people: 5.9, 2.8, 7.1, 1.9, 23, 2.1, 5.4, 5.4, 5.4, 28, 9.3, 6.4, 2.9, 2.9, 2.2, 2.2, 4.4, 3.8, 8.4. The first 5 of those have daily cases over 150 (and the top 3 are 560, 244, 217). 57 counties have daily cases over 50. One county (population 0.9k) has 0. Here are the rest under 50: 20.8, 24.0, 25.6, 31.3, 31.9, 43.0, 44.8, 49.7. Populations in k are 1.4, 2.4, 1.3, 3.2, 6.7, 4.2, 5.6, 2.3. Their biggest counties are in the middle. The 10 counties with population of 20k or more have daily cases of 99.4, 87.4, 84.8, 85.7, 64.8, 71.6, 123.9, 90.1, 189.1, and 68.6. (Populations in k: 190, 110, 61, 39, 35, 28, 28, 26, 23, 20). Compare to Washington (picked because I live there, so use it as a reference). We've got 9 counties under 20 new cases per 100k, 17 from 20 to 50, and 13 from 50 to 94.1. Our biggest counties (pop. in k: 2300, 900, 820) have daily cases of 22.5, 34.9, and 31.1. I'm in a county with 270k people, and we are hitting new highs now of 19.6 daily cases per 100k, which would make us the second best county in the state if we were in South Dakota. Rural areas are supposed to be where you go to escape a pandemic. How do you turn rural areas into places that are hardest hit?

jrs235 6y ago
> How do you turn rural areas into places that are hardest hit? By acting like it isn't a big deal and not taking it seriously at all and therefore taking little to no precautions.
- stolenmerch 6y ago
  That's largely not true. Most of these states have similar restrictions and mask mandates and public compliance as the rest of the country. California is doing no better than Iowa right now. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-map-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/states-reopen-ma...
stolenmerch 6y ago
It also depends on what metric is used to determine "hardest hit". ICU headroom used in Washington is about the same or higher than many states in Middle America.

imbnwa 6y ago

I can tell you that people stomp around outside in Chicago's gentried neighborhoods with no mask at a 50/50 clip from the naked eye, particularly in the daytime for some reason.