How Utah Is Different from Some Other States

I have been meaning to post about this for 3 weeks. Ironman at Political Calculations came up with some interesting skyline charts for state level data on COVID-19.

Originally the data was from June 2nd. They've now been updated to June 9th. I hope he continues to update.

Anyway, you read these by going top down: top is the past, the bottom is the present.

The width of each panel is scaled to represent 2% of each states population. So, wider bars mean a worse outbreak. Do note that the horror story that has been New York, is, proportionally only 2-3 times as bad as most other states.

And it's colored: black is deaths, dark brownish orange is people in the hospital, green is people who've been in the hospital and were discharged, and the paler orange is number of positive tests.

The top row is fairly easy to figure out: lots of deaths but they're not growing much anymore, many people testing positive. Not really surprising for those northeastern states.

But I'd like you to go down to the 7th row, where Utah is on the left. The chart shows very few deaths, and not many hospitalizations. But discharges are almost as large as tests.

What this tells me is that just about no one is getting tested until they need to go to the hospital. But once there, they're getting checked out fairly quickly.

And there's 3 levels of illness we should be concerned about:

1. You're infected but not sick enough to go to the hospital.
2. You're infected, and sick enough to go to the hospital.
3. You're infected, you're sick enough to go to the hospital, and you're so sick they won't let you leave.

I am OK with Utah hospitals pushing people out the door: they are worried about getting overloaded, and also about exposures of healthier people. By all accounts, many people can recover from COVID-19 at home. I trust hospitals to keep the people who should be kept, and in Utah we haven't had too many of those.

What worries me is that Utah is mostly people in # 2. (I'll skip Arizona which has exploded since this data was updated). But when I look at other states' charts, I see a lot of places where it's mostly # 1's: Kansas, California, Ohio, Nevada, Washington, Florida, Colorado, Missouri, Georgia, Virginia, and so on. Those are the ones I'm not really watching for news about.

Where are the states that match up with Utah (again, not counting Arizona in this one)? Iowa, Michigan, South Dakota, Mississippi, Minnesota, Tennessee, North Dakota, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Arkansas, South Carolina, Texas, Maine, Oklahoma, Idaho, Wyoming, West Virginia ... those are the ones I'm watching for news about. And none of them has really blown up yet, so maybe this all means nothing. We'll see.