Covid-19 Data

Covid-19 in Kansas:

The above map shows Covid-19 cases reported in the last week per 100,000 people by Kansas county, with darker red counties representing higher caseloads and grey counties indicating no newly reported cases or that there is an anomaly in the data. Currently, it seems Norton and Ellsworth Counties are experiencing a surge, with a general uptick in the western third of the State.

Covid-19 in The United States

The New York Times dataset I use to track cases in the United States is not perfect, but here is a map of new Covid cases per 100,000 people by county in the country as a whole. Note that we are likely missing data from Montana (I doubt the whole state has no new cases) and most of Utah is not accounted for. It is still unclear to me why this dataset has not been reporting the FIPS codes of the counties shown in white, which are necessary to make this map. Sometime I'll get around to writing code to automatically add them, but not today.

It looks like new case rates are particularly bad in Kentucky and much of the upper south, with Alaska, the great state of Kansas, and the parts of the Southwest also seeing surges. The heavy caseload in Alaska notwithstanding, I suspect that the heat wave has driven people into air conditioned spaces and might be driving some of this recent increase.

I set the scale on the map to max out at 400 cases per 100,000 so that the few relatively sparsely populated counties with local outbreaks would not be the only ones turning red. That is why there are a few black or blue counties on the map. Hopefully I won't have to revise the scale upward in the coming weeks.

It comes as no surprise that once again Loving County in West Texas is one of those blue counties, given that it has a population of 64 as of the 2020 census and has been dealing with an outbreak. As an aside, Loving County was also the last county in the Lower 48 to report a coronavirus case, not counting a non-resident at something that Wikipedia calls a "man camp" testing positive in August of 2020. Loving County may be the least populated county in the contiguous United States, but it apparently had the first female elected sheriff in the country, and it probably has a better eponymous murder ballad than wherever you live.