How Many Daily New Coronavirus Cases Should Your State Have?

You read a statistic that says today your state has 500 new cases of coronavirus. Is that good news? Wasn't it even bigger yesterday?

I decided to list, state-by-state, how many daily cases of coronavirus a particular state should have, using three different criteria. 

1. Your state maintains the number of new daily cases that it averaged over the past week ending July 25.
2. Your state is lowering its number by 10%. (90% of criterion #1)
3. The numbers your state would have if it were performing at the rate of an average European country.

To derive the numbers for criterion #3, I visited the worldometers coronavirus dataset, selected European Countries and yesterday, July 28. (Worldometer updates in real time, therefore it is necessary to go to a day that has been completed.) I selected only those countries with more than 500,000 population to make these numbers somewhat equal to the populations of the states of the United States. That provided me with information from 37 countries. Russia was included in this criteria. 

The 37 European countries have a combined population of 746,352,419 and 15,310 new cases. They have run 85,816,735 total tests (Worldometer does not provide daily new tests)

The 50 states and District of Columbia have a population of 328,238,913 (2019, last official census estimate) and 66,380 cases that day. They have run 55,298,426 total tests.

The individual European countries ranged from 0.5 new daily cases (Latvia) to 91.0 (Moldova) per million. 

The individual states ranged from 13.3 (Vermont) to 535.5 (Louisiana) per million. 

Below are each state, providing what to expect for daily cases based on the above three criteria. Cases per day are the average number of new daily cases the states had during the last week. Down 10% represents the figure if the state improved by 10%. Average Europe is if the state were matching the rate per population for the average European country. Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont would be doing worse by the European standard, the rest would be doing better.

State	Cases/day	Down 10%	Ave. Europe
Alabama	1842	1658	119
Alaska	78	70	18
Arizona	2682	2414	177
Arkansas	824	742	73
California	9852	8867	961
Colorado	599	539	140
Connecticut	128	115	86
Delaware	110	99	24
Dist Col	74	67	17
Florida	10992	9893	522
Georgia	3617	3255	258
Hawaii	38	34	34
Idaho	504	453	43
Illinois	1334	1201	308
Indiana	829	746	164
Iowa	503	453	77
Kansas	292	263	71
Kentucky	654	589	109
Louisiana	2489	2240	113
Maine	18	16	33
Maryland	835	752	147
Massachusetts	248	223	168
Michigan	612	551	243
Minnesota	707	636	137
Mississippi	1381	1243	72
Missouri	1209	1088	149
Montana	116	104	26
Nebraska	273	246	47
Nevada	1048	944	75
New Hampshire	32	29	33
New Jersey	292	263	216
New Mexico	293	264	51
New York	704	634	473
North Carolina	1876	1689	255
North Dakota	118	107	19
Ohio	1337	1204	284
Oklahoma	718	646	96
Oregon	335	301	103
Pennsylvania	912	821	311
Rhode Island	70	63	26
South Carolina	1785	1607	125
South Dakota	70	63	22
Tennessee	2066	1859	166
Texas	8302	7472	705
Utah	613	552	78
Vermont	8	7	15
Virginia	1020	918	207
Washington	813	731	185
West Virginia	132	119	44
Wisconsin	945	851	142
Wyoming	48	43	14

Martin Hill Ortiz is a Professor of Pharmacology at Ponce Health Sciences University and has researched HIV for over thirty years.

https://mdhillortiz.com/

Coronavirus Week Ending July 18

When I began this project in early May, cases were down and it seemed as though America had passed over the first wave of COVID-19 infections. This soon turned around.

The Role of These Blog Posts.

When resourcing the sites that looked at case data, I was disappointed by their focuses. Too much emphases were being placed on daily numbers and total numbers. Too much significance was being placed on the moment and not enough on the direction of the data. Finally, too much attention was placed on cases versus case rates.  

A lot of this has changed. Although I see headlines about monstrous sized daily cases, I see more sites reporting weekly rates. Still I believe there is a need for my graphs. I report the trends over time and present the rankings of the states and how those rankings change.

Assembling each week's data sets takes a lot of time and leaves little for additional analyses. I usually have one day free to focus on some subject such as antibody tests or testing rates.

The Week Ending July 18th.

Here is a report of the case rates for the week ending July 18th. 

It was another brutal week. Infection rates may have peaked in Arizona and South Carolina, while other states such as Nevada, Florida and Idaho became significantly worse. For the week ending June 6th, Maryland had a rate of 904.3 new cases per million population to rank first. This would not have made the top 20 this past week. Eleven states scored over 2000 new cases per million with Florida leading at 3867.2, a figure substantially higher than New York at its peak. 

Here are the top 20 states for percent increase in their weekly cases, that is, the week ending July 18th compared to the week ending July 11th. 

	one week
	increase
Alaska	49.6%
Alabama	46.3%
Nevada	45.1%
N. Dakota	43.1%
Maryland	42.9%
Montana	41.9%
Tennessee	41.1%
Indiana	37.6%
Virginia	37.3%
Rhode Island	33.7%
Washington	32.2%
Michigan	31.1%
Missouri	30.6%
Florida	28.9%
Oklahoma	27.6%
Nebraska	26.6%
Kentucky	23.2%
Vermont	22.2%
Idaho	21.1%
Illinois	20.9%

Note: some states start from very low numbers, such as Vermont which has ranked 51st each of the last three weeks.

Here are the top 20 for two week cases increases (the week ending July 18th versus the week ending July 4th).

	two weeks
	increase
Montana	122.1%
Kentucky	108.7%
N. Dakota	106.9%
Idaho	85.1%
Colorado	83.7%
Dist Col	76.9%
Oklahoma	75.7%
Missouri	73.2%
Michigan	71.2%
Alabama	70.8%
Virginia	68.5%
Indiana	61.1%
Alaska	59.5%
W. Virginia	55.8%
Maryland	54.5%
Tennessee	53.8%
Louisiana	52.4%
Washington	51.7%
Minnesota	51.6%
Nevada	45.9%

Each State Graphed.

The bars denote the rate of new cases per million population for the week. The numbers above the bars are the rankings of the states for the given week from 1 to 51 (including the District of Columbia). In order of rank:

Martin Hill Ortiz is a Professor of Pharmacology at Ponce Health Sciences University and has researched HIV for over thirty years.

https://mdhillortiz.com/