Author here: I originally started doing this for my state, Florida. I wanted to show what our normal cycle of deaths looks like. We generally have the most deat

Author here: I originally started doing this for my state, Florida. I wanted to show what our normal cycle of deaths looks like. We generally have the most deaths during the dry, cold weeks of at the end of January and the beginning of February. We generally have the fewest deaths during August, when it is hottest and most humid. There was a lot of discussion around how many more deaths were caused by COVID versus normal expected causes. I wanted to make that clearer. You make a good point about the area being misleadingly large. I had not thought of that. As for population growth, I thought about that but I'm not sure where to get reliable numbers for each region. As is, one can see that in 2017-2019, the curves were showing steady growth as expected to correlate with population.