It's Not Density: Figure It Out and Bend the Curves

It has been another long day here in the salt mines of my house. Please read Bill Lindeke's new post, called It's not density that's driving America's pandemic. Like me, he's a fan of The Ghost Map (though I guess you could say he's a professional fan, being an urban geographer).

I adore this graph he used from ourworldindata.org:


Check out those parallel curves... Italy paralleling  the U.K. paralleling the recent U.S. paralleling the recent Germany, with Spain at an even more extreme upcurve.

And notice, of course, that these arcs are on a logarithmic scale, with each horizontal gray line representing a new order of magnitude: .01 to .1 to 1 to 10 to 100 (not shown but just out of sight). South Korea has flattened out at just a bit above 1 death per 19 million people (well, not quite flat, and not quite 1), but compare that to those other arcs that rocket up the scale, with Italy approaching 100 deaths very soon and Spain on track to catch them not long after.

And that's without testing much of anyone in the U.S. except rich people, whether in prison or the Senate.

Oh, and compare the effect of having a governor who pays attention to epidemiologists (Kentucky) and one who doesn't (Tennessee):


Which state would you rather live in?

Meanwhile, since Mafia Mulligan started spewing at his daily-rally-cum-press-briefings, his approval rating for handling of the COVID-19 crisis has somehow improved significantly.

My only hope for this country, when it comes to that fact, is that it was only one poll.