COVID-19: New York’s Impact on National Numbers
When we look at COVID-19 data on a US national level we need to be careful of the outsize role that the state of New York, and more specifically New York City, play in the totals.
One can see New York’s outsized contribution to US COVID-19 case numbers in the tree map below:
As I wrote yesterday, New York is showing significant decreases in new cases, new deaths, and the number of people still in the hospital.
Since much of the US media is based in New York, reporters there have a natural tendency to see the rest of the country through a New York lens. I’m reminded of the famous New Yorker cover by Saul Steinberg that illustrates the way that New Yorkers view the rest of the US and even the rest of the world.
The national conversation lately has been around the pandemic reaching a plateau. Today I decided to see how much of that discussion is driven by New York’s improving situation. The charts below display key national trends with and without including New York.
With New York included, the number of new cases is going down and the number of new deaths has plateaued. If you remove New York however you can see that the rest of the country has plateaued in terms of new cases (and seems to be showing a second peak) while the number of new deaths is still climbing. Hospitalizations look a bit better for the rest of the country but this metric needs to be taken with a grain of salt as hospitalization data for many states is not available through the COVID Tracking Project. The curves for new tests seem to have the same shape whether or not New York is taken into account.
In conclusion, the improvements we are seeing in New York are not reflective of the situation in the rest of the country.
As usual you can find the supporting notebook in my GitHub repo.
