Wednesday, July 29, 2020

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.

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