Path to Zero
Suppose one number could tell us what our county needs to do now to move toward shutting down Covid-19. Suppose there were a color-coded map showing at a glance how our state, or all the states, are doing. This is exactly what was introduced yesterday by a nationwide group of prominent researchers studying the pandemic, led by the Harvard Global Health Initiative.
Their website is Global Epidemics; the page for exploring the proposed key metric is here.
The metric this group has settled on, and is trying to convince other Covid-19 tracking projects to use, is the 7-day trailing average of new cases per 100,000 population. If new cases in a county have averaged less than 1.0 over the previous week, the county gets a green color on the map. A value of 2 to 9 gets yellow; 10 to 24, orange; and 25 or over, red.
Below is the current map of US counties color-coded in this way; next is a key to the colors and the recommended remediation actions for each color.
Zooming in, we see Minnesota’s situation in finer detail. Three counties need drastic measures, a further eight are moving in the wrong direction, and for the bulk of the state (including the Metro), the virus is spreading slowly. Twenty-four counties are green, indicating that at this time the virus is under control there.
Below are the per-county details for Ramsey and Hennepin, which the dashboard shows when the pointer is hovered over the county in the state view.
I will be checking this dashboard regularly, along with the one showing national and state Rt values and the one using five metrics to assess each state’s readiness to reopen.
This is cool, Keith. At my new job we’ve been working with maps like these; I’ve discovered that the technical name for them is “Choropleths”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choropleth_map