Most contagious places in the US!

As of July 9th 2020.

AVOID ARIZONA AT ALL COSTS

Here is a truly shocking league table. It shows the estimate number of people who are contagious – expressed in per million terms. It’s calculated by looking at the number of people diagnosed over the last 2 weeks – and assumes a 2 week contagious period for those people. After the 2 weeks – they are assumed to be “coping” with COVID – but no longer contagious. For sure the data under-reports the contagious population as not everyone can get a test, or some may be waiting for test results, or some may be asymptomatic and not tested. Anyhow – here is the data.

Not suprisingly Arizona is the highest. If you were to come into contact with 1 million people – more than 6,000 of them would be confirmed to be tested positive. [Can we assume those tested positive are isolating? Probably not.] Lets put that into numbers we can relate to – it’s about 0.6% – or close to 1%. So 1 in every 100 people you meet in Arizona could be confirmed positive. Likely the number is much higher due to the under-reporting mentioned above.

Now – lets look at the worst 20 counties in America – expressed in the same terms. Unfortunately my home county makes the list!

State	County	Contagious per million
Arizona	Yuma	11,133
Texas	Nueces	10,381
California	Imperial	10,021
Florida	Miami-Dade	9,483
South Carolina	Charleston	9,329
Louisiana	Calcasieu	8,155
Texas	Galveston	7,754
Arizona	Maricopa	7,477
South Carolina	Horry	7,408
Florida	Duval	7,159
Texas	McLennan	7,069
Arizona	Navajo	7,059
Texas	Jefferson	6,742
Georgia	Whitfield	6,623
Tennessee	Davidson	6,575
Florida	Broward	6,033
Florida	Hillsborough	5,875
Louisiana	Lafayette	5,855
Georgia	Bibb	5,628
Georgia	Lowndes	5,587

This does not bode well for school reopenings in these states. Already the mayor of Nashville (Davidson county) has said schools will not reopen in August for in person learning.

For the top states, and top counties – more hard measures need to be taken to reduce the spread.

Here’s another worrying datapoint – hospital capacity. Using the assumptions of NY (that 15% of current caseload requires hospitalization) – that would result in about 12,000 beds needed in Arizona just for COVID. From the data source I get on the web – that puts hospital capacity utilization at 91%. I.e. very limited capacity for additional cases. Add in the media reporting of limited testing capacity in Arizona and images of people queuing for testing in the early hours of the morning- and it’s possible to predict worse news on the horizon.

Hospital capacity is better in Florida. Florida has 4x the number of hospital beds as Arizona – and by my calculation is within 50% capacity utilization at this time.

A final comment – Arizona has 15x the level of contagious people – per million than New York. Isn’t that a sobering thought. The Arizona governor thinks limiting restaurants to 50% is his solution! Not by a long shot! There’s a future case study in here of how not to handle a pandemic.