That diagram looks like the UK one, minus the UK’s “weekend effect”
I read somewhere that the US east coast got the European version of the virus while the west coast got it via a more direct route from China.
Here’s another one for you… the US total death rate has dropped notably, with a many week downward trend punctuated by the most recent week so low it seems unreal to me, 20% lower than for normal years. A data error could I suppose have resulted from the July 4th holiday but no holiday issue is evident in previous years. I imagine the earlier weeks are valid but the last week should be ignored.
Probably this one which I posted previously, asking if any other country has something similar (but nobody posted something).
The closest to that, that we have in Ireland, gives numbers “to date” broken down by electoral division. A division could be 1K people in rural areas to 40K+ in city areas.
The data is here
Ireland Covid Data Hub
The zoomable map part is a little less than half way down.
Regarding the rest of the debate, it’s clear that a lot of people will believe the data that suits their purposes to believe. That’s probably not surprising because they obviously have an incentive to believe that data and not the data that doesn’t suit their purposes. It takes significant effort to ignore your own bias, desires and beliefs and look at something in a perfectly unbiased way. Far fewer people achieve that than think they achieve it!
While having this debate we should all remember that we’d probably like to remain friends after this is all over 
Malibuflyer wrote:
I would so wish you are true! But as it doesn’t make sense at all to compare Countries/states where at least the first wave has already been stopped for some weeks with such, where it is in full swing, let’s look at this in a couple of weeks from now.
Sorry @Malibuflyer you miss the point. Florida remained open the entire time and Miami is a major gateway to the world for the US.
You are attempting to separate impact moment from total impact. The truth is that Florida was open the entire time that New York was.
By “science” (which is a nice blanket term – I’m a research scientist) what do you mean?
As @Off_Field clearly pointed out, closing borders only restricts foreigners, not citizens. So no loss of freedom there.
Yes, the gist of the argument here is clearly hinged on ideology.
Case in point: the crisis could be solved by shooting every positive case and imprisoning all those with symptoms.
That would stop it in its tracks, right? Yes, kill the host, kill the virus.
Obviously, I do not support that ideology though.
Neither do I support mandated shutdowns of entire countries over perfectly normal phenomena.
Freedom has a price, and those willing to pay it live free.
AF wrote:
As @Off_Field clearly pointed out, closing borders only restricts foreigners, not citizens. So no loss of freedom there.
Sorry, but it was Silvaire who held the Europeans responsible for not taking measures to prevent the virus to jump from Europe to the US. It is well understood that it have been predominantly US tourists (from Italy) that did so. Therefore if Silvaire blames the Europeans for not preventing it, he said that Europeans should have prevented that US tourists can go home.
It would have been so “funny” to read his and your comments here if European countries really had build a Guantanamo for US tourists to prevent them for getting back to US (at a time btw. where the US still ignored that the virus exists).
On Florida and Miami: Miami is absolutely no such thing as a gateway to the world – itÄs a gateway to (parts of) Latam. There is no direct flight to Asia and compared to NY/Boston few direct flights to Europe. As Latam got the virus quite late, obviously Miami has not been an inroad. So the only thing that Florida proves is, that such infections spread globally over time and not instantaneously.
By now, Florida has reported 266k cases – that is 1.250 cases per 100k people. Not as much as NY yet, but while NY, e.g., had 2.500 new cases in last 7 days, Florida had 70k !
It’s worth reading Silvaire’s comments to understand the fundamental difference between the US and Europe. We have lived in the US (well, the California Bay Area, which is almost the same thing) for nearly 20 years, and it has taken the Covid crisis for us to start to figure it out.
Americans love this idea of “freedom”, even when it comes at enormous cost with no apparent benefit: the freedom to own guns, the freedom to have no health insurance, the freedom to transmit pandemics to each other. Our conclusion is that it is simply incomprehensible to someone who grew up in Europe, just like baseball. I expect the same is true in reverse – to the average American, European (or even more so Asian) willingness to sacrifice personal freedom for the perceived good of society is unthinkable (as Silvaire lucidly states).
As long as they can own guns, the average American is happy. This is MUCH more important than having decent health, or having a fair share of the nation’s wealth, or anything else. You may think I’m being sarcastic, or exaggerating, or something. Sorry, no. That’s exactly how it is. (There is a significant minority, mostly from one pixel down each side, who don’t agree with this, but they ARE a minority).
Whereas Europe and Asia have things under control, the above factors mean that the US will continue to have an explosion until herd immunity kicks in. MAYBE (looking at New York and London) this will happen fairly quickly. Let’s hope so.
That said, one state – New Mexico, not generally known for its liberal views – has imposed mandatory masks in public spaces, with a $100 fine for non-compliance, and quarantine for people crossing the state line. So maybe the freedom to stay alive will at some point start to strike people here as a good idea. Of course the example set by the president is hardly helping.
To add some real data to the discussion around how good the fatality rates are: Just taken the CDC data from yesterday and plotted the “fatality rate” (defined by deaths per 1.000 infected) vs. the start date of the wave in each state (by “visual approximation from the infection graph”; can’t be defended +-few days).
Positive interpretation would be, that we have learned very rapidly how to treat the disease – negative interpretationn would be that the deaths are yet to come in the states on the right hand side…
I do feel there are two fundamental questions that we cant answer, or so it would appear.
1. Why the mortality in the States is so low (thank goodness). The States seem to defy the experience of most other countries (with the exception of Germany) in that as cases have increased mortality has fallen dramatically. I accept it may point to change in demographic of those with the virus, and, presumaby it may point to better treatment regimes.
2. Why in some large cities the rate of infection has fallen dramatically. It would seem the measures taken to limit the spread are substantially less than were taken in Europe and yet NY is doing well. Do relatively small measures have a dramatic effect or is there some other explanation?
Silvaire wrote:
But they are still facts, from which individuals can properly reach their own opinion.
They are facts in a totally trivial sense. If some health authority states on day X that the day before Y people were reported dead of Covid-19, then the fact is only that the health authority made that report, nothing more. It is certainly not a fact that Y people actually did die of Covid-19 the day before X. Before we can say anything about that we must know what “reported” actually means and what “dead of Covid-19” actually means. Many, many examples have showed that this is far from straightforward.
The variation of daily figures over the week that @alioth refers to is an example of this. Administrative procedures means that there will always be a delay in reports. Fewer administrators work on weekends meaning that reports of deaths actually happening Friday-Sunday will be delayed more. This will cause a variation over the week in reported deaths even if the actual number is constant.
This daily variation can easily be greater (in either direction) than the long-term trend so it is disingenuous to use it to make a point.
For many years climate change deniers used a similar tactic to show that the global temperature was actually decreasing by using 1998 as base year for comparisons. That was an unusually warm year — an outlier in the long-term trend. That kind of dishonest argument ended suddenly when 2015 was found to have been even warmer than 1998.
Why the mortality in the States is so low
I think partly because they got the epidemic later, and have thus had the benefit of more knowledge. Hospitals are getting much better at threatment – rapidly so due to the huge volume of cases, which makes it easy to spot what works and what doesn’t, and since so many are dying anyway it is easy to do a bit of “unofficial experimenting” without getting busted for it. When this thing arrived, everybody thought the answer was ventilators and thousands of them. Most countries built huge facilities for these. In Germany, they even took over the Aero Friedrichshafen halls (never used AFAIK). In the UK they built a 4000-bed facility in London and smaller ones elsewhere (almost not used at all). It was realised early on that most ventilated patients die (Italy) so one needs to get a bit more clever about it. A lot of people die due to clots, not [only] because the lungs don’t work anymore, so blood thinning helps. But many people get strokes despite being pumped up with thinners; this is a continuous learning process.
Also countries which have heavy private funding (read: insurance based) have better facilities. In Europe, Germany is at the top of this. My part-family in Germany says how expensive the insurance is, but they do have kit coming out of their ears. The US is probably similar; they just love “kit”. The UK NHS is run on a shoe-string… to “just cope” with the rising level of obesity-driven diabetes which nobody is allowed to talk about, on top of the normal stuff.
Probably other factors too. I read that the dose you got strongly drives your outcome (as well as the incubation time). It would follow that someone infected in a low population density scenario is more likely to have had a lower dose. This would translate into a higher proportion of less severe cases.
Do relatively small measures have a dramatic effect
I reckon so, but nobody knows what they are 
