How Is North Carolina Doing Compared To Other States?

As a long-time resident of North Carolina, I wanted to see how our state compared to some other states in the growth of COVID. For comparison I chose the next largest state, Georgia, and the next smallest, Michigan.  I also added Florida as the third most populous state and also one of the warmest. Finally, I also created a black line showing either the US rate or North Carolina's "share" of the US number based on population. The collection of charts (which will be updated daily) is here.

The results were pretty surprising.  Here is the growth in cases (click any graph to enlarge). 

Because US cases pretty much arrived at the same time, I did not attempt to graph them on a common timeline, like I have with countries.  North Carolina is well below its peers in COVID Cases.  The black line shows that we would closely resemble Michigan if we had our representative share of all US cases.  We are WAY below where I expected us to be.  At first I thought maybe we just weren't doing as many tests in NC as other states. As I've written, much of the growth reported in the US is actually due to a spike in testing. 

It turns out that NC has been doing tests at a higher rate than Ga and Mi (even though the CDC headquarters are in Ga).  We parallel the black line so closely, it seemed that we may have been getting tests based on our % of US population, except for March 24th.  Florida, which is twice our size, has done about twice our number of tests.  

Even with the additional testing, perhaps we're just not finding the cases that Ga and Mi were finding, but all the other states have suffered many more deaths than NC has to date:

We are so much lower on confirmed COVID cases and COVID deaths, there ought to be some explanation.  Here are a few possibilities:

• Atlanta and Detroit both have direct flights to China where RDU and CLT do not.  I looked at cities with china flights, and the cities with the most China Flights -- NY, LA, SF, and Seattle  -- are all hot spots.  Las Vegas was one of the smallest cities to have a China flight and their current number of COVID cases are twice the numbers of Iowa and Arkansas, who have very similar populations.   
• It could be that we're on a different timeline.  I'm assuming COVID came to the states at about the same rate, but Mi and Ga had our case counts only 4-6 days ago.  If this is true, it should become evident in the next several days. {UPDATE: A friend who's close to health officials in NC says that states are definitely on different timelines.}
• It could also be that NC's population is less concentrated than the other states.  The greater areas of Atlanta and Detroit's each represent 50% of their state's population, while greater Charlotte is only 24% of NC's population (less because some of that is in SC), and RDU is around 12%.

The last graph I made was on the rate of positive tests.

I show this test only after March 13th because the testing before then was scarce so the numbers had major shifts.  Again, NC has a different pattern than the others.  Mi and Fl, like the US is trending up on the percent of positive tests while NC has gone down.  This could be a sign that other states are doing better at where they use their tests, but given NC's low death rate it seems more likely that we actually have a lower infection rate despite doing more tests than Mi and Ga. 

The graphs from this blog are all conveniently located in a tab in my spreadsheet and that data is on another tab.  Feel free to share https://tinyurl.com/NCCOVID with others who want to track this information.