Update on Surging States -- looking at state-wise trends in daily cases and deaths

Let's look at an update of what we are seeing in surging states using our updated COVID-TRACKING app. Here I plot 7-day moving average of daily cases/million and daily deaths/million at the state level.

Here are the 4 states experiencing the most serious post-Memorial day surge, AZ, TX, FL and SC:

In Arizona the daily cases have leveled off and perhaps starting coming down, and TX and SC have continued increasing but perhaps at a slower rate, while Florida keeps accelerating.

Notice that the deaths have started to increase as well, as predicted, with Arizona especially taking off in the past month. In the other surging states, the deaths/million is lower but has easily doubled or tripled since late June and likely to keep increasing given the recent surge. Remember also that this surge is driven largely by younger people who have far lower risks of death, but by introducing a much higher prevalence of virus in the state, this surge will be hard to keep from the older and more vulnerable populations and so the surge could produce considerably more deaths in the end.

Almost the entire south has also followed this trend and surged in the past few weeks:

Louisiana, Georgia, and Alabama are accelerating the fastest, but Mississippi and Tennessee are not far behind, and North Carolina is starting to creep up as well.

Deaths have not increased too much, although in LA, AL, and MS we might see an uptick starting and, as we see above, deaths lag so they are probably coming.

The west coast has also been consistently increasing.

We see California, Utah and Idaho increasing the most in per capita daily counts, but New Mexico, Washington and Oregon also show a clear upward trend starting late June.

The midwest and middle Atlantic are relatively under control but showing some upticks, and these are more apparent in county-level data where certain counties are experiencing upticks and in more danger of a surge.

New York and New Jersey are still way down from the peaks of their previous surge and state-wide numbers look under control, but NYC is showing evidence of upticks so needs to be careful to not let another outbreak occur there.

And finally New England remains under control, although a recent uptick in Rhode Island bears watching and is a reminder to stay vigilant.