The Spread of COVID

I lived in Elkhart County, Indiana, for my first 23 years or so, and most of my family is still there. For the last 30 years, I've lived in Montgomery County, Maryland. CNN recently put up a COVID tracker and I thought it would be interesting to compare the two counties. I should note that Montgomery County is in deep blue Maryland, while Elkhart County is in deep red Indiana.

First up, the stats for Montgomery County. Because MoCo is such a diverse, international county, we were hit by the Coronavirus early and things got very bad quickly. We recovered, but there has been a recent spike.

The virus reached Elkhart County much later and spread more slowly, but Elkhart has a population much more resistant to social-distancing and mask wearing, which resulted in a huge recent spike.

By the charts, it looks like MoCo has done much worse than Elkhart County, because of the initial spike. So what are the totals to date?

The data is illuminating. Montgomery County has more than five times the population, but a little less than twice the cases. MoCo deaths are four times that of Elkhart, but most of those deaths came in the early days when we knew less about how to fight the virus. And, as a percentage of population, Elkhart has had it worse. (Several of my relatives have had the virus. Thankfully, none have died.)

The infected rate in Elkhart, however, really tells a significant story, approaching 10% of the population. That's the whole "resistant to mask-wearing" effect.

It should also be noted that this data does not include what will likely be a huge post-Thanksgiving spike, as many Americans are fucking morons.