Here's An In-Context Update For North Carolina

We're 4 weeks into our lockdown.  Let's look at how NC is doing.  First, I added a new graph to my set for NC that looks at the growth of new cases for NC and other states:

The numbers can bounce around a bit because of testing rates, so I did a rolling 7-day average of the number of new cases to get a clearer picture.  While it's still early, it looks like Florida and Michigan have peaked. North Caroline remains much lower than the comparable states (Ga and Mi are our closest in population).  NC May have peaked in cases per day. If not, its pretty close.  It's also encouraging to look at the US line (while pro-rated for NC, the shape is the same).  As I wrote Thursday, it looks like we're also close to peaking, or peaked as a country. Unfortunately, it looks like Georgia is still climbing. 

Another important note is that NC's line isn't just lower, its on a different slope -- one with barely a curve to it.  It's becoming clear that our situation isn't due to being on a different timeline (our days past 100 cases is within a week of the others). The growth factor here seems distinctly different.

Now let's look at some previous graphs. Here's our current status on total cases.  While our cases have gone up, we are far below others our size.  We're also far below our share of the US cases. 

This trend is even more pronounced when looking at COVID deaths:

I wrote recently that NC has many fewer cases per population than the other southern states.   Another interesting fact is that Texas and NC are the only two large states (>10M people) to have under 10 Deaths per 1M population -- we're tied with Arkansas for 7th in this category.

On Testing, we continue to keep a decent pace.

We've fallen a bit off the pace of our national share, but given our low case rate, it's good the tests are being concentrated more in places like Florida and Michigan.  I don't see how testing could be giving a false impression that we're levelling off on cases at any rate.

Finally, let's look at hospitalizations. 

While I have less confidence in this stat,  the excellent Covid Tracking Project has a volunteer team that scours every state's reports and press releases several times a day to fill in this data. Unfortunately, they don't offer an overall US hospitalization count (i fyou know of one, let me know) so I can't graph NC's share of hospitalizations -- but it seems clear this would be below the national average as well.

That ends today's report.  Time to go out and enjoy the sunshine and the Carolina springtime.  I hope you have a wonderful Easter weekend.  If you want to celebrate it with me, my offer still stands.