Some states (and especially their governors) just don’t seem to have any self-control …
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Open Mind 
This guy made a chart of red vs blue states. Population weighted?
Cooperation vs Competition
It is an ideological problem for any society that adopts the neoliberal principles of Hayek and Friedman – and it is pretty clear which one works best when confronting this sort of problem. The problem with climate is a more important example of “this sort of problem”.
We survive as groups, and cooperation is critical. Lying to oneself and others is a poison for the society, and too much of it is invariably fatal.
Mother Nature is – not happy with us.
Cooperation vs Competition
It is an ideological problem for any society that adopts the neoliberal principles of Hayek and Friedman instead of that of Keynes and Monbiot – and it is pretty clear which one works best when confronting this sort of problem. The problem with climate is a more important example of “this sort of problem”.
We survive as groups, and cooperation is critical. Lying to oneself and others is a poison for the society, and too much of it is invariably fatal.
Mother Nature is – not happy with us.
I agree with BJ on the question of cooperation versus competition. I part company when BJ says that mother nature is not happy with us. I think that any entity that we might identify as mother nature or god or gaia etc. is largely indifferent to the fate of any species or individual. We play our part and our fate awaits us. As sentient beings with the ability to review behaviors and consequences, I think we are an unusual species and that unusual ability allows us to have an active hand in our fate as a species. I think it is amazing that we can actually figure out what we need to do to promote stability and reduce suffering, but it may be beyond our species’ collective ability to do what we need to do. I think we have our fate in our own hands to some extent and we are busy wringing the life out of many of the things we touch. We are wringing the life out of our fate to some extent.
Mother nature is not mad at us imho. I am not even sure it makes sense for us to be mad at ourselves about our failings. Maybe we are just a strange and wonderful species that has found a physical world niche that we can exploit to a wildly destructive extent?
I am somewhat philosophical about all that because I cultivate some connection with all living things, but I am personally pained by it because I have an quotient of empathy that makes it impossible for me to avoid feeling bad about what appears to be unnecessary suffering.
The way our species in its nationstate formats is responding to the Covid pandemic is flawed in much the same way as our response to the environmental crisis is flawed. Maybe we are doing the best we can? But we can always aspire to do better. What do we have to lose with that approach?
As US citizens, though, we should limit our immediate political aspirations to do better to the possible election of Joe Biden as our next president. That would certainly be an improvement, that would be better than giving the other guy a second term. Is that the best we can do? well, who knows, but to get along, we should all limit our immediate aspirations to do better to the changes that are possible with Joe Biden as president. These are the options that fate appears to offer to us.
But speaking of premature conclusions, the other guy is about to enter a closed space with about 19K other human beings for a noisy election event. It is possible that none of the beings in that enclosed space will be spreading Covid 19, but that seems unlikely to me. I think it makes sense to be cognizant of the vicissitudes of the pandemic and our existence. Let’s wait and see who is still standing on election day. I see no reason to believe that surprises are a possibility. Silly me. So stupid to bring any of that up, right?
The numbers continue to be all over the place because testing is not standardized or readily available which leads to the opportunity to choose a number to talk about that suits the purposes of the person making the choice. But it is possible to tease the “truth” about covid out of the pool of numbers. As the virus spreads throughout the general population for the next year or more, more and and more people each day can be expected to have an “aha” moment (if they still need one at this late date).
Covid 19 is a serious health emergency and there is no easy way to manage it so far. There are many ways to mismanage the covid emergency. We are trying several them out on an ad hoc basis in the states where the governors are willing to trade deaths and illness for economic activity numbers that are to their liking.
There are many opportunities to spin the bad outcomes. We can look forward to some dissembling in that process. Personally, I don’t think Hillary’s emails or Barack’s birth certificate have anything to do with the Covid pandemic, but it’s hard to prove that to everyone’s satisfaction.
excess mortality might be a more reliable statistic
Also the positivity rate may be better than the number of confirmed cases in order to help remove the effect of increased testing
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states/usa
Andre,
The link you provide yields no reduction in the % of positive results but for the featured states in the OP a significant increase in the % of positive results over recent weeks for all but one of them.
Florida 3% to 8%
Arizona 7% to 17%
S Carolina 3% to 10%
N Carolina no great change
Texas 5% to 9%
For South Carolina, positivity has clearly been rising for at least 28 days. Scroll down on this linked page to see graphs:
https://www.scdhec.gov/infectious-diseases/viruses/coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19/sc-testing-data-projections-covid-19
Excess mortality?
Data can be found here .
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Note the delay in reporting makes it unreliable if used for recent weekly death rates.
Al Rodger,
I agree. Though if you look at California confirmed cases it looks worse than all the others but the positivity remains fairly constant. Interestingly, I don’t see the deaths rising much in these states. Maybe it is too soon or the positive cases are biased to a younger population compared to the initial infections.
Also relevant is the hospital bed capacity found here,
https://www.cdc.gov/nhsn/covid19/report-patient-impact.html
I think death per infection ratio has dropped quite a bit over the past few months for a number of reasons. One reason fo drop in mortality is probably better awareness of the infectious agent which has helped people manage to get infected but with a smaller initial dose of infectious agent than was happening before it was widely understood to step back (or run) if someone starts sneezing or coughing near you. I also think medical practice is starting to get a better handle on how to manage the infected population to control and reduce incidence of cytokine storm and to better suppress the virus itself and reduce mortality rate. The numbers are a complete mess for analysis imho opinion for a number of reasons and have been since the pandemic started. Bottom line – covid 19 is a global pandemic and will cause a lot of death, suffering and assorted kinds of damage. Avoid it if you can. Get a vaccine when vaccines are available. Don’t live in a red state or share space with fools who are opposed to wearing masks. The stupidity is profound and risk of infection jumps with this kind of stupidity. If nothing else, wear a mask to show you disapprove of our idiot president. Unless you are at a rally for our idiot president, in that case, wear no mask and scream and cheer a lot to express your indifference to an airborne infectious virus. What is the worst that could happen?
Andre,
I write from the ‘right-and-side’ of the pond so am one-step removed from the situation in the US. We Brits have got over the peak but whether the foolishness of Boris and the Yesmen will prevent a second peak is still to be decided. So far they have killed about 1,000 per million population if ‘excess deaths’ is used as the measure, about a three-times the officially-quoted US death toll although how accurate that US Death toll is I know not. (We have to contend with Boris-Lies so we are familiar with duff data being pumped out to make Boris happy.)
But it looks quite obvious that parts of the US are facing a second peak and the powers that allowed such a second peak are not the sorts I would have chosen to prevent such second peaks dwarfing the first one.
California looks less a second peak and more a first peak that keeps on coming. Maybe the rampng-up of testing is finding more asymptomatic cases. But whatever is going on, the first peak is not declining. Thinks – could this be California having a go at what was the original UK strategy?
(The original UK strategy was to treat Covid like flu and let it run through the population with (1) measures to delay the spread if it began to overwhelm medical services while (2) protecting the old-&-vulnerable. But mid-March they chickened out and turned Boris’s “squashed sombrero” into more of a flat cap. Testing suggests the infection has reached 10% of the population so the herd immunity [they deny was ever their policy] is a long way off. They also did the opposite of protecting the old-&-vulnerable with the old more exposed to the virus that the population as a whole: thus the UK has the worst per-capita death toll in the world – so far.)
“First peak” demands a definition. For the US, the ‘first peak’ for fatalities came on April 21, when we lost 2,693 people. There’s been a pretty clear decline since then, with the low number so far coming on June 14, when we lost 331. (Yesterday, the toll came in at 791, but the difference from the 14th is almost certainly the product of a marked weekly cycle–one might die on the weekend, but reporting of that death is markedly less likely than on a Friday.) Trend is not really discernible right now, IMO; we just have to wait for more data.
in terms of new infections, the peak looks to be April 4, in terms of eyeballed ‘change points’–though the literal peak came three weeks later on April 24. (The weekly cycle in new cases develops post-April 4, interestingly.) The 24th saw a whopping 39,072 new cases. Compare that with yesterday, which saw 33,539–the 8th-highest day in the record. We are now clearly working on a ‘second peak’ in new infections–though there’s no telling specifically where that peak may eventually lie.
Then there’s active cases. The UK, along with a few other nations, appears not to report this, but America does. And by this metric–IMO, the most important, as it is a direct measure of the instantaneous disease burden–we are still on our ‘first peak’. True, there was a ‘mini-peak’ on May 30, followed by a dip which bottomed out on June 3. But I would argue that it’s not very consequential. Since then, it’s been uninterrupted ascent to the great and glorious high of 1,219,722 active cases, with no particular end in sight. Hence my insistence that we haven’t actually reached ‘first peak’ yet as a nation.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
The US figures are distorted by the early outbreaks being dominated by the large numbers of NY/NJ. Those states have apparently got things under control and the numbers are significantly diminished. A plot of US-NY/NJ would I think show a second peak due to geographical differences.
Phil.
Subtracting NY & NJ from Total US doesn’t make a massively big difference to the look of the data. The Total US daily Covid cases have a distinct downward trend between early April & mid June with just the last week showng its worrying climb. The trend amounts to a drop of about 10,000 cases per day over the period.
Subtract NY & NJ and that downward trend disappears (it becomes very marginally an increasing trend) and the recent climb now looks a more significant feature.
The next few days remain the deciding factor.
“The US figures are distorted by the early outbreaks being dominated by the large numbers of NY/NJ.”
Can’t be a “distortion”, as the ‘early domination’ is ineluctably part of the reality being dissected here. “Characterized” might be a better word. I know that sounds pedantic, and maybe it is, but the framing feels important to me.
Is it possible that doctors have been more widely using steroidal treatments for several weeks and reduced death rates? It has been recently reported these treatments might lower fatalities 30%. Apparently in Portugal they have been using them for months.
If that were the case graphing cases would give better data than graphing uncorrected death rates.