The United States surpassed 100,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in a single day for the first time on October 30th. Much of the spread this fall seems to center in the Midwest and adjacent states including North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Wisconsin. How is the South faring? The answer is that it depends. There appears to be a clear pattern – the southernmost states, including Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina, did not set new highs for daily cases in October, while the states to their north, including Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia, all set new highs for daily cases. See the graph below for a comparison of these two regions, which is adjusted for population.
The group of states in red had fewer cases than the blue region during the summer, but crossed over on September 24th. Since then, the more northern states have seen daily cases increase by 44%, while the others have only experienced a 7% rise. One possible reason for the difference is that the weather is warmer in the more southern of the southern states – they are all adjacent to the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean, so maybe more people have been spending time outdoors in these states, where it is harder for the virus to spread. It is still not that much colder in southern Tennessee than it is in northern Alabama, but maybe the difference is enough to have an impact.
If you look at deaths, the picture is not as clear. Only four southern states set new highs for daily deaths in October – Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Oklahoma. All four exhibit a similar pattern – a lot of fluctuations in August and September, followed by a surge in October. See the graph below for a population adjusted comparison.
Most troubling for me is that Tennessee is currently experiencing the biggest surge in deaths per million. The recent reinstatement of mask mandates in many of the counties in the Nashville metro area will hopefully help reverse this trend.The silver lining is that deaths are still less than half the peaks seen by Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas at their summer peaks and 38% below the Florida peak in deaths per day when adjusted for population.