5 Slide Series

This week’s edition of the 5 Slide Series tracks recent COVID-19 trends. We have summarized the weekly progression of cases, tests, and deaths through July 8 at the national, state, and county levels. 72% of the US population resides in a county where the number of new cases increased during the week of July 1 – July 8 relative to the previous seven-day period.

This edition of our 5-slide series quantifies– in numerous ways– the disturbing resurgence of COVID-19. In 46 states, for example, the number of new cases emerging during June 23-30 surpassed the number from the prior week. The number of new COVID deaths this past week were 50% above the fatalities during the previous week.

Our tabulations are provided at the national and state levels (including US Territories), and we’ve also identified the 20 counties with the largest increase in new cases this past week relative to the previous week.

This edition’s COVID analytical focus has been on tabulating the weekly percentage increase in new tests relative to the weekly progression of new cases. Comparing June 17-24 with June 10-17, tests increased by 6% but new cases jumped up by 34%. This suggests that a very large disease spread is now occurring — far beyond the dynamic that more tests are identifying more underlying cases.

We also show that nursing home residents accounted for 26% of COVID deaths through June 7, and that 70% of the US population resides in a county where the number of new cases increased more this week versus during the previous week.

This edition summarizes state and county dynamics regarding the progression of cases and deaths. We have tabulated new cases per capita by month in each state. More than half of the US population (54%) lives in a county that reported an increase in the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases this past week (June 10 – 17) compared to the prior week.

This edition of our 5 Slide Series is our 20th special edition focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic. As with all prior editions, we have tabulated several highly current data points. The newest type of analysis involves quantifying differences in COVID death rates per capita by race, showing that through June 7, African Americans have experienced more than twice the COVID-19 per capita death rate as Whites, Latinos, and Asians. We also provide various statistics regarding new confirmed cases and tests, nationally and state-by-state – including state rankings on the degree to which new confirmed cases have emerged in the past week.

This 5 Slide Series edition tracks COVID-19 trends in various ways, such as the weekly progression of cases and deaths throughout the past three months. We’ve also captured week-to-week COVID-19 testing trends on a national basis. The number of new tests per week has nearly tripled since the beginning of April, but only two states have tested more than 10% of their population to date.

This edition of the 5-slide series has multiple components. We have grouped all counties (and states) into cohorts based on their overall population per square mile, to quantify the relationship between population density and COVID cases per capita. As one would expect, COVID has spread much more rapidly in higher-density population areas, with the per capita rate of infection through May 27 more than 3 times higher in our most dense population cohort (counties with more than 1,000 residents per square mile) than in our most sparsely populated cohort counties with fewer than 50 residents per square mile). Interestingly and perhaps importantly, the recent rate of new case growth is highest across the most sparsely populated counties – the number of new cases this past week was 10% lower than in the previous week across the nation’s most densely populated counties, but 6% higher across the most sparsely populated counties.

This edition conveys our tabulations on the recent week’s COVID developments. A key finding is that while new cases decreased by 3% nationwide this past week relative to the prior week, more than half the nation’s population resides in a county where the number of new confirmed cases increased. A more encouraging finding is that while nearly 10,000 new COVID deaths occurred this past week, this figure was 5,246 lower than the previous week’s new death count.

We have also provided testing data for each state. Nationwide, less than 4% of the population has been tested as of May 20; state-level figures range from a high of 11.4% in Rhode Island to a low of 2.2% in Idaho.

This edition of the 5-slide series quantifies COVID-19 per capita death rate differences by age cohort and between genders, tracks the recent emerging volume of new cases at the county, state, and national levels, and includes a slide on the Top 25 Counties with regard to cumulative confirmed cases per capita.

This edition of the 5-slide series conveys four data tabulations: 1) distribution of COVID deaths by age; 2) distribution of COVID deaths by gender within each age cohort; 3) county level tabulations on new case growth; and 4) a set of state level statistics on confirmed cases and deaths.