The COVID Digest, 29Oct2021

Things heat up in the west

Let’s start by talking about national trends. The top 10 states (one is a territory, Guam) for new case rate are shown below along with their color rankings (red is bad, green is good) for death rate, test positivity rate, emergency department diagnoses, COVID-19 admissions, additional hospital metrics and COVID-19 vaccination rate for the total population. The data for this table comes directly from the HHS Community Profile Report.

Alaska and West Virginia were early success stories with the vaccination effort. But that stalled some time ago. What’s concerning about Alaska is that there aren’t a lot of neighboring states or cities for them to lean on for hospital space. Six of the top 10 states are part of the Mountain West. In the graphs below, the US is subdivided into regions as shown in the map from the US Census Bureau below.