It hasn’t been very satisfying to me seeing tables and maps telling me bloody obvious facts like New York has a lot of COVID19 cases and Wyoming doesn’t have very many. No kidding? 
I kept hearing praise about SD’s management of the pandemic (no lockdown, tastes great!), and not-so-good things about FL (closed their beaches too late), but what about the effects of total population and population density? I’ve been to both states many times, and I’m pretty sure FL is a wee bit more crowded than SD. Plus there’s a lot of southern FL (and LA) that probably gets counted as land but maybe all that swamp shouldn’t be counted. If your house floats or you wish it could or you have to raise it on poles that sounds offshore to me. Hell, Houston feels kind of offshore lately.
I used some basic public data sources to analyze the impact of population and population density on COVID19 cases in the USA jurisdiction lands. A data table and three charts are attached. The analyses show some interesting surprises. Of course nobody knows how many people actually contracted the disease while making a visit to another state (FL or TX @ Spring Break) and then tested positive after they got back home ( to NY / NJ / PA). Still, I’ll bet it will surprise nobody that the greatest outlier in terms of per capita disease rates is the home of our fearless leaders in Washington DC! Somebody is taking very good care of them using our money! NY doesn’t look great by comparison with even their neighbors MA/CT/RI, but if you consider that the real population density of Gotham is skewed far downward by a lot of near-empty land upstate, I can’t knock them too hard. FL actually looks pretty good, as well as TX and CA. On the other hand, when you consider population density, LA doesn’t look to good, nor does SD.
Another thing I can see in the data are about 6 states that are above ~0.7%+ of the total population in terms of case counts, and most states are still down around ~0.2% of the population. The few states with the higher per capita case counts show the rest of us what can happen, so keep following the mitigation guidelines and keep using the loads of common sense that I believe most people on this forum have. Stay home as much and as long as you can afford to. Reminds me of some famous advice that IDUNNO once said - “Keep your powder dry, and stay away from crowds”.
Full disclosure - I’m an engineer residing in SE Texas and working for a publicly traded energy company.
I kept hearing praise about SD’s management of the pandemic (no lockdown, tastes great!), and not-so-good things about FL (closed their beaches too late), but what about the effects of total population and population density? I’ve been to both states many times, and I’m pretty sure FL is a wee bit more crowded than SD. Plus there’s a lot of southern FL (and LA) that probably gets counted as land but maybe all that swamp shouldn’t be counted. If your house floats or you wish it could or you have to raise it on poles that sounds offshore to me. Hell, Houston feels kind of offshore lately.I used some basic public data sources to analyze the impact of population and population density on COVID19 cases in the USA jurisdiction lands. A data table and three charts are attached. The analyses show some interesting surprises. Of course nobody knows how many people actually contracted the disease while making a visit to another state (FL or TX @ Spring Break) and then tested positive after they got back home ( to NY / NJ / PA). Still, I’ll bet it will surprise nobody that the greatest outlier in terms of per capita disease rates is the home of our fearless leaders in Washington DC! Somebody is taking very good care of them using our money! NY doesn’t look great by comparison with even their neighbors MA/CT/RI, but if you consider that the real population density of Gotham is skewed far downward by a lot of near-empty land upstate, I can’t knock them too hard. FL actually looks pretty good, as well as TX and CA. On the other hand, when you consider population density, LA doesn’t look to good, nor does SD.
Another thing I can see in the data are about 6 states that are above ~0.7%+ of the total population in terms of case counts, and most states are still down around ~0.2% of the population. The few states with the higher per capita case counts show the rest of us what can happen, so keep following the mitigation guidelines and keep using the loads of common sense that I believe most people on this forum have. Stay home as much and as long as you can afford to. Reminds me of some famous advice that IDUNNO once said - “Keep your powder dry, and stay away from crowds”.
Full disclosure - I’m an engineer residing in SE Texas and working for a publicly traded energy company.
