Outside MA: California, Florida, Texas, and Washington D.C.

Periodically, I look at states and countries where I have friends and/or family to see how those states are doing with COVID-19 cases. I always take a look at the population size of the state as well so that the comparison I'm making to MA numbers is somewhat valid.

Today, let's take a look at three states (and a district) where I have family, friends, and colleagues and which are seeing the same pattern: California, Florida, Texas, and Washington D.C.

All these locations are seeing a similar pattern: a big first wave followed by a decline and then a slow climb.  The outlier here is timing.  For California, Florida, and Texas they hit their peak in July while Washington D.C. hit their peak at the end of April.  Likewise, each then receded with the three states reaching a low case load in September whereas Washington D.C. has been on the climb since early July.  

With roughly 3 times as much distance between that low point and today, Washington D.C. has seen by far the slowest increase of the 4 locales.  They now see 2.8 times the number of cases as they did back at the start of July after 4 months whereas Florida now has 1.9 times their low count, California has 1.3, and Texas has 2.1 with only 1 or 2 months' time.

They also all stopped their decline in cases before the New England states did in terms of how low their daily case count had dropped.  Rhode Island was an outlier within New England with 4.4 cases per 100,000 people, MA was next up with 2.2.  By comparison, Washington D.C. had 4.7, California had 8.2, Florida 10.6, and Texas had 11.3.

They say everything is bigger in Texas but that doesn't come true for the top of their curve.  While at 36 they had more than MA's 31.8, they were beat out by a long shot by Florida's whopping 55.2.  California and D.C., showing greater concern for their citizens' health, peaked at 26 and 27.7 respectively.

Summary:

• California did the best with stopping the curve early and driving the cases down before re-opening and as a result of their efforts to limit the spread still only see 11 cases per 100,000 people per day. (compared to MA which is seeing 18.7).  While this is still above the 8.0 threshold MA has set as the "red" zone, it's still below what pretty much everywhere else that has a dense cities has that I've reviewed recently.
  
• Florida peaked way higher than anybody I've seen so far in my reviews and stopped short of reducing their cases to below 10 cases per 100,000 people.  The result of their recent efforts has them sitting at 20 cases per 100,000, which is higher than Massachusetts' 18.7 (but lower than Connecticut or Rhode Island), increasing their cases by 75% in the roughly 5 weeks.
  
• Texas may not have seen the same peak as Florida but they made up for it by starting to see their decline in cases stopped sooner.  They dipped to 11.3 at the start of Sep and started increasing again and have rebounded with 2.1 times as many cases in the last 7 days as 24-30 days ago and are currently sitting at the top of the pack with 23.8 cases per day per 100,000.
• Washington D.C. has done its citizenry just about as well as California has, coming just higher than them in all counts except for where they drove the case count lower, reaching 4.7 cases per day per 100,000.  They've since also come back to the red with 13 cases per day per 100,000 but that's over the course of 4 months!  They're seeing a rate of increase of 1.4 per roughly 3 weeks though, which is higher than California's 1.3 but lower than Florida's 1.8 and Texas' 1.6.  
• All of these states are seeing a lower rate of increase in cases than New England by the way.  Florida and Texas have higher case count per 100,000 but that case count just isn't increasing as quickly as the New England states right now

Stay safe. Stay sane. Stay informed.