Last week I wrote about how new cases had maybe flattened a wee bit in their rapid drop from peaks earlier this year. But the good news is that even in where new cases declines may have slowed down, they continue to decline.
New case curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
We can see the tails at the right ends are all back to declining shapes. Delaware is perhaps the most deceptive, because remember that there was the anomalous spike from late processing of earlier new cases.
I had noted that deaths had finally seen some data showing them dropping. That has held true to some degree.
Death curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
Indeed, the tails at the end of each state have shown slow declines. Delaware is even near 0 deaths per day. Illinois, however, is an exception with a small increase lately.
Finally, a brief look at vaccinations.
Full vaccination curves for PA, VA, & IL.
You can see that the rate of full vaccinations has begun to slow. All three states we cover are over 40%, though all are below 45%. Pennsylvania is difficult to evaluate, however, because for the last four days Philadelphia has not updated its numbers. And as the largest county by far in the state, it’s shifts can swing the overall state numbers.
Last week I wrote about how we were seeing new cases continuing to rapidly decline. This week we can say cases are still declining, but perhaps a bit less rapidly than earlier.
New case curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
The charts above show that slowdown in the tail at the right of the chart. First some points to note, Delaware reported that several hundred cases had not been entered into their database, and so we saw a one-time spike midweek. But note that after the spike, the numbers continue to trend down. In other words, the rapid decline was probably a bit less rapid than we saw, but it was still a decline.
Pennsylvania’s chart has a problem of your author’s own design. Now that I’m fully vaccinated I was able to leave the flat this weekend and the Pennsylvania data wasn’t ready by the time I left on Saturday. But by the Sunday data, it was and so the 2500 new cases is probably split somehow between those days—accounted for by the seven-day average. This points to a broader question for which I do not yet have an answer: as life increasingly returns to normal, how much longer will I continue to update these charts?
I started these graphics as a way for myself to track the spread of the virus in my home state and the state where I still have a large number of friends. At the time, there were few if any visualisations out there doing this. Now most media outlets have them and my work at home led to a similar project at work. The reason I continued to make these was you, my readers here and in other places where I post this work. Your comments, messages, texts, and emails made it clear you valued the work. First, I know there are still many people left to be fully vaccinated, nearly half the population, and due to bias, some of the people most likely to follow these posts are those most likely to get vaccinated as early as possible. But please let me know, readers, if you’re still getting value out of these graphics.
But back to the data, in two of the remaining three states, Virginia and Illinois, we saw numbers continue to decline. New Jersey, however, shows a tail with a slight uptick in the seven-day average of new cases. This will be something I follow closely this coming week.
Deaths finally appear to be dropping.
Death curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
Not by large numbers, no, but in Virginia and Illinois we saw declines of 5 deaths per day. Pennsylvania was even greater with a decline of 7. We are still above rates we saw last summer, but it does appear that finally we have hit the inflection point we have been waiting for the last several weeks.
Finally we have vaccinations. These charts look at the cumulative number of people fully vaccinated.
Fully vaccinated curves for PA, VA, & IL.
And in that the number keeps going up, and that’s good. But they can also only keep going up. But if you look closely at the right tail of the curve, you begin to see it flattening out as the rate of daily vaccinations begins to drop. Unfortunately we’re well below levels we think we’d need for herd immunity. But, to try and look at the positive, we’re almost halfway there and that is certainly playing a role as we can see with the rapid decline in numbers of new cases. But we need to keep trying to get more people vaccinated.
Two Fridays ago I received my second dose of the vaccine. In other words, I’m fully vaccinated and can resume doing…things. Anything. And so this piece from xkcd seemed an appropriate way to wrap up what has been a horrible, no good, terrible year.
Last week I wrote about how new cases in the five states we cover (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois) were falling and falling rapidly. And this week that pattern continues to hold.
New case curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
If we look at the Sunday-to-Sunday numbers, daily new cases were down in all five states. If we look at the seven-day averages, cases are down in all states. Pennsylvania and Illinois are now down below 2000 new cases per day, Virginia is just over 500 per day, New Jersey is below 400, and Delaware is over 100. These are all levels we last saw last autumn. In other words, we’re not quite back to summer levels of low transmission, but this time next month, I wouldn’t be surprised if we were.
Deaths remain stubbornly resistant to falling.
Death curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
In fact, if we compare the Sunday-to-Sunday numbers we see that the numbers yesterday were largely the same as last Sunday, except in Pennsylvania where they were up significantly. The seven-day average?
Here’s where it gets interesting, because deaths are up slightly. Not by much, for example, Illinois was at 29.1 deaths per day last Sunday, this Sunday? 30.9. Illinois isn’t alone. Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia all have reported slight upticks in their death rates.
But the biggest concern is the continuing slowdown in vaccinations. We’re perhaps halfway to the point of herd immunity in the three states we track. All three are between 37% and 38%. The thing to track this coming week will be if the rate continues to slow.
Last week I wrote about how, for new cases, we had seen a few consecutive days of increasing cases. Were we witnessing an aberration, a one-off “well, that was weird”? Or was this the beginning of a trend towards increasing new cases?
A week later and we have our answer. Just a one-off.
New cases curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
If we focus on just the seven-day average, in just one week the numbers in New Jersey have fallen by half. In Pennsylvania, Virginia, it’s by one quarter. Illinois is a little less than that, as is Delaware. Across the board, numbers are falling and falling quickly.
Deaths curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
When we move to deaths, we’re beginning to see an improvement. As the lagging indicator, we would expect these to begin to drop a few weeks after new cases begin to drop. We have begun to see what might be the peaks of deaths in a few states.
Full vaccination curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
Over this coming week, I’ll be closely watching these numbers to see if we can finally begin to say authoritatively that deaths are in decline.
Vaccinations drive all of this. And we continue to see the total number of fully vaccinated people climbing in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Illinois. But, that rate is slowing down. Most likely we are entering a phase where those eager for their shots have largely received them. Now begins the challenge of vaccinating those who might lack easy access or have reservations.
But to be clear, we need those people to become fully vaccinated before we can truly begin to return to normal. Whatever normal is. It’s hard to remember anymore.
I’ve been trying to limit the amount of Covid-19 visualisations I’ve been covering. But on Sunday this image landed at my front door, above the fold on page 1 of the New York Times. And it dovetails nicely with our story about the pandemic’s impact on Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois.
Some not so great looking numbers across the globe.
For most of 2020, the United States was one of the worst hit countries as the pandemic raged out of control. Since January 2021, however, the United States has slowly been coming to grips with the virus and the pandemic. Its rate is now solidly middle of the pack—no longer is America first.
And if you compare the chart at the bottom to those that I’ve been producing, you can clearly see how our five states have really gotten this most recent wave under control to the point of declining rates of new cases.
However, you’ve probably heard the horror stories from India and Brazil where things are not so great. It’s countries like those that account for the continual increase in new cases at a global level.
Credit for the piece goes to Lazaro Gamio, Bill Marsh, and Alexandria Symonds.
I didn’t write a post last Monday, but this Monday I am. A few things may have changed in the Covid situation. The most important is that we may have finally seen the peak of this current wave’s surge of new cases.
For the last few weeks we’ve seen cases rising in the five states. Only New Jersey of late had shown a return to declining cases. About the middle of the week before last, we began to see those numbers decline. And so in this past week we did begin to see cases decline in all five states.
New case curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
The thing to watch this week will be that at the very end of last week, new cases ticked up slightly for two or three days in a number of states. It could be an aberrant one-off, but with full vaccinations still well below herd immunity and cases still at high levels, it isn’t difficult to imagine a scenario where the virus begins to surge once again.
Deaths on the other hand, they continue to climb. We aren’t seeing massive increases, instead these are largely marginal. But they are increasing all the same.
Death curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
Encouragingly, if cases can continue to decline, deaths will begin to fall. As a lagging indicator, they will be the last metric we see decline. Consequently, it’s a question of when, not if, deaths begin to decline. On Saturday, we did see a small decline in deaths, but one day before the weekend is insufficient to determine whether or not we’ve seen the inflection point, after which deaths would fall.
Vaccinations remain a broad set of positive news. All three states are now reporting just over 30% of their populations as fully vaccinated. However, the rate of vaccination has begun to slow.
Total vaccination curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
And that worries me and the professionals, because we are still far from herd immunity. Until we reach that level, the virus can easily spread among unvaccinated populations. The charts above don’t show the decline, as they look only at the total, cumulative effect. But the charts that I see make it quite clear the decline over the last week or two.
Moral of that story is, if you haven’t been vaccinated yet, please register to do so or visit a location that allows walk-up vaccinations.
Last Friday I received my first dose of the vaccine, and I’m not counting the time until my second and then the two weeks after that to let it take effect. It also means that the repetition can begin to end.
Over at Indexed, Jessica Hagy sort of captured that idea in a single Venn diagram.
Yesterday I wrote my usual weekly piece about the progress of the Covid-19 pandemic in the five states I cover. At the end I discussed the progress of vaccinations and how Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Illinois all sit around 25% fully vaccinated. Of course, I leave my write-up at that. But not everyone does.
This past weekend, the New York Times published an article looking at the correlation between Biden–Trump support and rates of vaccination. Perhaps I should not be surprised this kind of piece exists, let alone the premise.
From a design standpoint, the piece makes use of a number of different formats: bars, lines, choropleth maps, and scatter plots. I want to talk about the latter in this piece. The article begins with two side by side scatter plots, this being the first.
Hesitancy rates compared to the election results
The header ends in an ellipsis, but that makes sense because the next graphic, which I’ll get to shortly, continues the sentence. But let’s look at the rest of the plot.
Starting with the x-axis, we have a fairly simple plot here: votes for the candidates. But note that there is no scale. The header provides the necessary definition of being a share of the vote, but the lack of minimum and maximum makes an accurate assessment a bit tricky. We can’t even be certain that the scales are consistent. If you recall our choropleth maps from the other day, the scale of the orange was inconsistent with the scale of the blue-greys. Though, given this is produced by the Times, I would give them the benefit of the doubt.
Furthermore, we have five different colours. I presume that the darkest blues and reds represent the greatest share. But without a scale let alone a legend, it’s difficult to say for certain. The grey is presumably in the mixed/nearly even bin, again similar to what I described in the first post about choropleths from my recent string.
Finally, if we look at the y-axis, we see a few interesting decisions. The first? The placement of the axis labels. Typically we would see the labelling on the outside of the plot, but here, it’s all aligned on the inside of the plot. Intriguingly, the designers took care for the placement—or have their paragraph/character styles well set—as the text interrupts the axis and grid lines, i.e. the text does not interfere with the grey lines.
The second? Wyoming. I don’t always think that every single chart needs to have all the outliers within the bounds of the plot. I’ve definitely taken the same approach and so I won’t criticise it, but I wonder what the chart would have looked like if the maximum had been 35% and the grid lines were set at intervals of 5%. The tradeoff is likely increased difficulty in labelling the dots. And that too is a decision I’ve made.
Third, the lack of a zero. I feel fairly comfortable assuming the bottom of the y-axis is zero. But I would have gone ahead and labelled it all the same, especially because of how the minimum value for the axis is handled in the next graphic.
Speaking of, moving on to the second graphic we can see the ellipsis completes the sentence.
Vaccination rates compared to the election results
We otherwise run into similar issues. Again, there is a lack of labelling on the x-axis. This makes it difficult to assess whether we are looking at the same scale. I am fairly certain we are, because when I overlap the graphics I can see that the two extremes, Wyoming and Vermont, look to exist on the same places on the axis.
We also still see the same issues for the y-axis. This time the axis represents vaccination rates. I wish this graphic made a little clearer the distinction between partial and full vaccination rates. Partial is good, but full vaccination is what really matters. And while this chart shows Pennsylvania, for example, at over 40% vaccinated, that’s misleading. Full vaccination is 15 points lower, at about 25%. And that’s the number that needs to be up in the 75% range for herd immunity.
But back to the labelling, here the minimum value, 20%, is labelled. I can’t really understand the rationale for labelling the one chart but not the other. It’s clearly not a spacing issue.
I have some concerns about the numbers chosen for the minimum and maximum values of the y-axis. However, towards the middle of the article, this basic construct is used to build a small multiples matrix looking at all 50 states and their rates of vaccination. More on that in a moment.
My last point about this graphic is on the super picky side. Look at the letter g in “of residents given”. It gets clipped. You can still largely read it as a g, but I noticed it. Not sure why it’s happening, though.
So that small multiples graphic I mentioned, well, see below.
All 50 states compared
Note how these use an expanded version of the larger chart. The y-minimum appears to be 0%, but again, it would be very helpful if that were labelled.
Also for the x-axis in all the charts, I’m not sure every one needs the Biden–Trump label. After all, not every chart has the 0–60% range labelled, but the beginning of each row makes that clear.
In the super picky, I wish that final row were aligned with the four above it. I find it super distracting, but that’s probably just me.
Overall, this is a strong piece that makes good use of a number of the standard data visualisation forms. But I wish the graphics were a bit tighter to make the graphics just a little clearer.
Credit for the piece goes to Danielle Ivory, Lauren Leatherby and Robert Gebeloff.
Last week I wrote about how we may have been beginning to see divergent patterns in new cases, i.e. how New Jersey in particular had seen its new cases numbers falling whilst other states continued with increasing case counts.
One week later, that may still broadly hold true.
Emphasis on may.
New case curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
If we look at the new charts, we can see that broadly, New Jersey did continue its downward trend as Pennsylvania and Delaware experienced significant rises in new cases. Virginia remained fairly stable, but with a slight trend towards increasing numbers of new cases.
But New Jersey and now Illinois present some interesting trends to watch this coming week. Illinois reminds me of New Jersey in that despite rising numbers most of last week, the last few days (and of course the weekend) saw numbers lower than preceding days. You can see from the slightest of dips at the tail of the line the trend has flipped direction. Will the direction hold, however, once we start receiving weekday reporting figures starting Tuesday?
Back to New Jersey, though. The downward trend continued most of the week. But, the last several days could portend a reversal of sorts. For most of the last week, the state saw daily new case numbers increasing day after day. But the trend line, as it should, remained heading downwards. Until just a few days ago. If you look at the tail of the line there, you will see a slight uptick. This too will be something to watch in the coming week.
Deaths also need careful attention this week.
Death curves in PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
Last I asked the question, will deaths follow rising cases? After a week of data, the answer is unmistakably yes. However, unlike new cases, the increases are largely of a marginal number. Look closely at the ends of the lines for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Illinois and you will see last week’s shallow rise continued.
Virginia bucked the trend with decreasing numbers of deaths. And of course marginal increases could easily give way to marginal decreases. Now I try not to mention too many daily numbers in these posts because I take the weekly view, but I will be closely following Pennsylvania this week. For the last several weeks, the Commonwealth regularly reported deaths on Sunday and Monday in the single digits. Yesterday Harrisburg reported 40. Is this a one-day surge of reports? Is the state resuming reporting more deaths at the weekend? Or does it portend something worse, a mores significant rise in the number of deaths?
Vaccinations continue apace. Although, I would expect to see some slowdown as the Johnson & Johnson vaccine pause ripples out across the vaccination programme.
Fully vaccinated curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
For now though we continue to see increasing numbers. Indeed, the three states I track have now all reached or should reach today 25% of their population as fully vaccinated.
One, that is good news.
But, two, this is just the beginning.
Last week in some tense questioning about when we can expect resumption of “normal”, Dr. Fauci provided a figure of 10,000 new cases per day across the US. (Currently we are about at 60,000 or so.) Vaccines will impede the transmission as they become ever more widely administered and fully implemented—remember that a first dose of a two-dose regimen does not mean you should be heading out and socialising.
At present, we have Pennsylvania averaging 5,000 new cases per day. In other words, Pennsylvania alone represents half of Dr. Fauci’s target. We are clearly far from that reopening level.
What I will be curious about in the coming weeks though is that interplay between new cases and vaccinations. If Illinois does begin to see a downward trend in new cases this week, how much of it is due to the state being 25% fully vaccinated?
That’s a complex question to answer, but at some point, increasing vaccinations will force new cases to reach an inflection point. First they will begin to bend downward, increasing more slowly instead of exponentially. Then with even more vaccinations a second point will be reached at which this new surge begins to finally turn and new cases drop.
