US COVID Deaths: Update
How is the US doing now that lockdown is being eased in many states?
Here is a 3D version of the figure shown in an earlier post, updated for the last few weeks. This format shows the variations in time a little better, but because New York and some neighboring states have such high numbers, it is hard to read data from many of the other states. Note that the width of each bar gives the population of that group of states, so area of bar gives total number of deaths for those states in a given week.
This plot emphasizes the big decline in deaths for the states with the highest death rates early in the season (chart shows 13 weeks of data). However, even in these, the numbers have not been declining as much in the last few weeks.
States with small death rates have had less change over time. Note that, for example, a set of states totalling 10 million people with 10 deaths/million has 100 deaths/week, and probably represents around 10,000 people/week getting the disease (assuming around a 1% death rate) several weeks earlier. This is an indication that the disease is not under control – there were still enough carriers for it to spread rapidly once lockdown procedures are relaxed.
All this comes with the caveat that deaths are a lagging indicator. It would be better to know how many cases we have now, but I still do not know how to interpret those statistics since the intensity of testing is changing over time. Newspaper reports of a recent increase in cases implies that there will be an increase in deaths in a few weeks.
Data comes from https://covidtracking.com/data.