Why Did Utah Gerrymander the U Campus for Its COVID-19 Dashboard?

Utah is now making public finer data on COVID-19. That's good. 

But, if you tunnel down, the area reporting statistics for the U is split up. 

The campus itself, and a lot of off-campus housing falls in the region called "Salt Lake City (Downtown)". From the northwest corner where I-15 flies over W. Temple, this goes south along the interstate to 1300 S, then east to Liberty Park (but going north and east around the park) then east to include East High School, wiggling northwards to include those nice neighborhoods behind the cemeteries where people street park for football games, then east up 500 South to Wakara Way, then hooking around the entire campus to come back along South Temple. This completely excludes the Avenues, where many faculty, staff, and some students live. It also excludes the research park southeast of campus, and some neighborhoods with some students a bit further from campus on the other side.

It's pretty tough to see this map well, since the whole region is coded red due to high incidence over the last two weeks.

The U is included in the white bordered region in the middle (the dark lines appear to be train tracks).

The incidence in that area currently is 652 per 100K. That's roughly twice as high as the 4 regions bordering from the northwest to the south-southeast sides. And it's roughly comparable to the South Salt Lake and Glendale regions bordering to the southwest. 

Now ... listen up. The scale at the bottom right is roughly doubling at each step, until you get to the top. The upper bounds go 50, 100, 200, and then presumably should go to 400 and then 800. There needs to be at least one more color because those 3 bad regions would be in it, and possibly two because they'd be pushing the border of the next one. 

AND ... there's no decent way to figure out whether the U is doing worse or better. I'm not asking for much, but it seems to me it would make sense to have a cutoff somewhere between 900 East and 1100 East to isolate and get data on the U's stakeholders.

************************************

You can download a lot of data on this now (look for the link at the end of the first paragraph on this page). Even so, I am seeing in that overall case counts for these regions, and last 14 day case rates for counties, but I am not seeing last 14-day case rates for these finer regions. They clearly exist somewhere, but they aren't public yet.

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.

What Makes Macro So Hard? Not a Yogi-ism, But Still Good (Optional)

This relates to Aaron’s question from the class quodlibet.

Attributed to Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut:†

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.

In a nutshell, this is the problem with teaching macroeconomics. Is there any other field where the theory in texts is more blithely ignored by the practitioners?

Via the comment thread at Newmark’s Door for this post.

† This quote is often mis-attributed to Yogi Berra.

Food for Thought (Optional)

New colleague Paul Schneider repeated this example in brown bag seminar on teaching:†

Honestly, I wonder how many adults would respond that this question is not answerable.

In doing quantitative work, particularly with undergraduates, I run into something like this. It’s a sure fire sign that a student doesn’t understand the problem their working with if they print out every possible digit produced by their computer or calculator. Rounding, I guess, is an indicator of comfort with your level of understanding.

† I believe the cite for this is Bransford, John D., and Barry S. Stein. "The IDEAL problem solver." (1993).

Technorati Tags: bransford,stein

Augmented Capital

What if capital owned the labor instead of the other way around?

In growth theory, it’s called augmented labor, when we invent technology that allows a worker to control/use more capital at the same time. The robot above is capital, and it needs augmenting.

In this comic strip, that might be something like a way for a bunch of humans to nap with a minimal number of robots watching over them. Gee … sort of like a more benevolent vision of The Matrix.

This also illustrates growth and level effects, of technology. If the robots invented a technology that allowed them to control more humans, that would be a level effect that’s good for the robots. But having to deal with all those extra humans needing their nap would be the negative growth effect.

From the December 5, 2015 issue of Dilbert.

OPTIONAL: Tyler Cowen Thinks We Should Wake Up to the Misdirection

Is Trump playing liberals for fools?
Maybe.

Trump specializes in lower-status lies … The lie needs to be understood as more than just the lie.
… Long-term credibility does not need to be maintained. Once we get past blaming Trump for various misdeeds, it’s worth taking a moment to admit we should be scared he might be right about that.
… The Trump administration trusts neither its own appointees nor its own supporters, and is creating a situation where that lack of trust is reciprocal. That is of all things a strategy for getting things done …

Yikes.
This is just Tyler’s opinion, but he thinks on way more levels than I do.

******************************

OOPS! You do not have to read this post.

I use one software (OpenLiveWriter) to write blog posts for multiple blogs. Above the line is a post I wrote for, and did post to, my non-academic blog voluntaryXchange. But I also clicked the button to post it here too. Unfortunately, it's 2017, and with social media, once something gets posted, it's hard to undo, and easier to just apologize. So ... sorry about this.

You're welcome to go read that blog if you like, but it isn't required. If I really want you to read something it's here on the class blog.

Please note that this post is paired with the one that immediately precedes it on that blog. So, if you do read this, go read this other one too. I'm not pro-Trump, but I'm trying to figure out how this is all going to pan out. I'm warming to the viewpoint that if he's crazy, he's "crazy like a fox"