Parallax View - part the fifteenth [update]

Another week's up, so here are today's numbers:

   >= 1,000 - 490
100 to 999 - 1,255

Grand total of counties reads at 3,1503,151. Oh joy. Not much territory left to invade; most of it is in the empty spaces in Utah and Montana. A few weeks ago, the total count went down for a week. This week it might be unwarrantedly high. 3,1503,151 might exceed the total of counties plus 'county like' jurisdictions. And the newly affected count is 79, which, if memory serves, is way higher than recent months. And, we have a winner: Puerto Rico! 78 of the count; the lone other county is in the Lone Star state, not much to surprise there. Come on down! Seems to have been some data munging bewtixt this AM and now. Only one new county, in Idaho, which boosts the total to one higher than earlier today.

[Saturday, 18 July with 16 July map]
On that very subject, I had a look at Kansas county populations, Kansas being at the geographic center of the USofA (well, right on the state's northern border with Nebraska). What might be the case if Kansas counties made it out of the blue groups into the yellow+ groups?

Turns out that there just aren't that many counties with a passel of meat sacks. The list has 105 counties. Of those, only 38 have 10,000+ folks. And of those, only 10 are 50,000+.

Zooming in on Kansas, and fiddling with group display, we get the following:

   >= 1,000 - 8  
100 to 999 - 11
  25 to 99 - 31
  10 to 24 - 18
    5 to 9 - 19
        <5 - 15

Here's the interesting bit: as with the USofA map over all these weeks, if you display the 10 and 25 groups of counties, lo and behold, they neatly abut each other. There are but 2 blue counties all by their lonesome; one around Colby and the other around Pratt (you have to zoom in a lot for Pratt to be seen, btw). Covid is invading on a step ladder process. Just as it has from the beginning.

There is one interesting anomaly. When displaying the 25 and 100 groups, as might be expected, there are a number of 25 counties that don't abut any 100 counties; the inference being that Covid is under a bit of control in the lower count counties (say that 5 times fast). Well, may be not always. Add in the 1,000+ counties; lo and behold the southwest 25 counties are blocked on counties around the cities of Dodge City, Liberal, and Garden City. That's quite a jump. Kansas ain't out of the woods anymore, if ever they thought they were.

"Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore."
[Saturday, 18 July with 16 July map]

ex-President AuH₂O 2020 spouted yesterday, once again, that Covid would just go away. Some day. And on that day, he'd be right. Lots of folks said much the same about the various Black Plagues through Europe in the middle ages.