Analysis by Keith Rankin.
At the end of last month I published a chart showing the main features of Covid19 deaths in the United States. Today I publish an update, which has most of the same American places.
At the end of last month, New Orleans (125 deaths per million people) had the worst outbreak, followed by New York City (90 deaths per million). Since then, while New Orleans’ deaths have increased six-fold, NY City deaths increased 23-fold, to 2,105 per million. It is not clear why New Orleans was worst then; that may have been partly random, like the recent outbreak in Ecuador that I noted yesterday.) New Orleans is now stabilising.
Last month’s chart showed the places – in the west – which caught Covid19 very early, such as Seattle (America’s original hotbed of infection), Silicon Valley and Las Vegas; these places most likely first got Covid19 from China directly, or indirectly via Macau or Hong Kong.
Last month’s chart also showed the huge European-sourced Covid cluster of New York City, with hints of the Philadelphia to Boston population corridor (Fairfield, Norfolk, and New Jersey). It also showed one major rustbelt outbreak (Detroit), with hints of others (Chicago and Milwaukee). And Washington DC, as the political capital, also showed an incidence well-above the national average.
Also, some parts of Georgia were hotspots, including Atlanta. Interestingly, Georgia had United States’ own version of Europe’s San Marino – Docherty County – representing a cluster of cases and deaths in the city of Albany, Georgia. (Docherty County has lost 118 people so far, in an urban area the size of Palmerston North.)
In April, New York and its corridor satellites (Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Philadelphia) became riddled with the new coronavirus that causes Covid19. (Note that New York City uses two columns of the chart, so its reading is 2,100; not 1,050.)
Indianapolis has emerged, with Chicago and Washington DC, as a significant Covid19 hotspot. While some rustbelt cities (eg Detroit and Milwaukee) continue to show up, they still have Covid19 instances well below New York City.
As predicted the initial western clusters of Covid19 have comparatively diminished, though they have still shown substantial absolute growth of the disease. Sars-Cov2 is a resilient virus.
These cities, however, remain sideshows to the New York event. New York’s death rate is more than three times higher than that of Belgium, Europe’s worst hit country, and about ten times worse than Wuhan. It’s not as bad as New Zealand in the Black Flu of 1918; then, at least seven in a thousand New Zealanders died. (Compare with New York’s two in a thousand in 2020, so far.)
I did an estimate for Milan City, in Italy, and I got between four and five deaths per thousand Milanese. So New York, while an appallingly tragic victim of this pandemic, is still not the worst affected major city in the world.
