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/