Looking at the NYT Covid case map there is something that has always puzzled me: Why do Covid cases seem to conform to state lines?
I can only think of two contributing factors, and I don't find either terribly convincing: State lines map to cultural distinctions in important ways, and reporting of cases is affected by decisions made at the state level. A third possibility: I am imposing my expectations on a map that doesn't really show this at all.
In my part of the world, I believe you can see an identifiable difference between neighboring counties in Maryland and West Virginia, and a more subtle -- but existing -- difference between neighbors in Maryland and Pennsylvania, or Maryland and Virginia.
I bet a statistically smart person could do some really interesting work on this. All I have is my eyeballs and a map with arbitrarily colored divisions. I am also imagining a visible difference in cases along I-95.
This is on-topic because I spend a lot of time during the pandemic thinking about that stupid map.
Reporting is mostly done by state health departments, and their standards aren't always the same. This has been an ongoing source of frustration for data analysis people throughout the pandemic.
I once read a paper about how you can see I-95 in the syphilis statistics. I think their reasoning was truckers.
I've been confused about this too, especially around very dramatic AL/MS/TN borders. But after some investigation and discussion I think it's almost certainly just delays in reporting backlogged tests. That is, in states that are incompetent they're still running a lot of tests from a week or two ago and hence getting lots of positives. That is, I think that currently state-level effects are mostly inflating numbers in states like KY/TN/WV/ME. For example, the real numbers in Western Kentucky are probably actually similar to Southern Indiana, but testing delays moved the peak a week or so later.
4: it really looks like there was a huge I-90 effect on spread. I fully believe that Omicron first took off in the NY area but was rapidly transmitted along I-90 by truckers.
In particular, I wonder whether Cleveland is a common place to spend the first night for truckers making a pickup in NYC?
But they do like to cross Pennsylvania on I-80 because of the lack of tolls.
Yeah, but the weird thing is I thought the early Omicron stuff included Western NY along I-90. But population density along I-80 is just so low that maybe it just doesn't spread quite as quickly to see anything there.
Pennsylvania sex workers are better at wearing masks?
That seems implausible on a number of levels.
Taylordle 20 2/6
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1: my first thought would be it's not so much distinction by state as it is by metro, as most states will be dominated by a few greater metropolitan areas. Those differences will then be washed out in the state by state numbers.
To phrase it better, the differences within a state will be washed out and the differences will appear to be at the state boundary. But of course I'm sure state public health reporting processes matter too.
15, 16: How would that affect county-level maps like the NYT's, though?
Yeah, I don't see how 15 explains sharp boundaries between counties on different sides of state lines even when they're in the same metro area.
I really do think it's delays between when the tests were taken and when the results were posted. In the case of Maine and its neighbors, this is definitely the case see this article. I just haven't been able to find similar confirmation for TN, KY, etc. Some other countries have good data by the date the samples were taken, but I'm not sure it's possible to get that data here.
If you mean the hotspots map, the vast majority of state lines there seem to be characterized by continuity, with discontinuity the exception - the north border of FL, the south border of ND, few others.
Looking specifically at WV, though it seems at a glance to follow some state boundaries, at a closer examination that big blotch looks more like the outlines of Appalachia than it looks like state outlines. For example, the five easternmost counties of WV look much more like the parts of MD and VA they border than the rest of WV; several counties in border Ohio look more like WV and KY; and of course western VA versus the rest of the state.
I guess PA has a good chunk of Appalachia and looks nothing like WV or KY; that could be a state health department issue, I suppose.
It's less dramatic now than a few days ago, but AL was really dramatically lower than MS and TN. Since then MS numbers went way down. Similarly TN and KY were dramatically different from the other side of the Mississippi, and the whole Ohio river was dramatic, with KY and WV high and OH and IN low.
TN seems to have finally dropped, but as recently as yesterday the entire southern border of TN had drops by a factor of 2 or 3 at exactly the state lines.
The Volunteer State. They aren't limiting to volunteering for socially useful things.
A lot of times a discontinuity in covid cases at a border suggests a county with a state prison adjacent to a county without a prison.
My uncle has maybe days so there is no point in my trying to get myself there at this point. Had a tearful conversation with my mom (his sister) last night.
I should add that he's been semi-comatose too
Florida is a state reporting at this level only weekly. So with the rapid rise and fall of Omicron it looked better than neighbors at the the outset and now lags a bit. I think Saturday is when it shows up on the map.
27:
If you look at he NY Times map today for instance, the Florida border anomaly is gone.
I have just found out that the man my mother buys bootleg roast duck from on a street corner is an adjunct who teaches philosophy at Baruch. (Look, I don't understand Mom's shopping habits any better than you do. If you have questions, I don't have answers.)
Can I assume he stands around with ducks under a trench coat?
I don't know enough about Baruch to have a stereotypical adjunct in mind.
I was about to say that surely the words in 30 have never been strung together to make that particular sentence before, but then I contemplated that there is an adjunct at Baruch selling bootleg roast duck on the street, so maybe he does regularly cause such sentences to be uttered.
Maybe I'll buy a duck? Roasting a duck seemed like a lot of work, but if it's something you can do illicitly, it might be worth the effort.
Why does it take 3 hours for a duck to roast? It's not that much bigger than a chicken?
We just drove to the whole other side of a river to try takeout from a new restaurant. That's probably enough work for food for me for the weekend. The river looked kind of alarming with the wind and the flooding.
I think I should try to grow a beard like Papa Atreides in new-Dune.
36.last: Yes. I went down to a place I look for birdsby the river and it was pretty spooky. Water was high enough to flood most of the trail I generally take. The fast moving ice floes (smallish) added to the drama and sense of don't-fall-innedness.
I'm at an enormous and wealthy high school that feels almost like an airport. It's my first dance competition. There's free wifi and no one minds if I keep to myself, so I'm on board with it all.
I always sucked at dancing, but these days between ankle pain, hip pain, and general tiredness, I feel like I can barely move except by plodding.
Not that you aren't younger than me.
I'm not dancing. Hawaii is. I see how that was confusing, though. It's a bunch of middle and high school kids doing Pom and High Kick and Hip Hop and Lyrical events.
She's probably younger than me too.
So sorry, Barry.
Kid and I made it to Colorado Springs, flight was fine, whatever I thought TSA was going to do to me didn't come to pass, my sister picked us up, we got drivethru enchiladas and are now lodged at her enormous new house. Mom, who's on a weird medication-influenced sleep cycle and had gone to bed early, came out of her room long enough to get hugged. Cave of the Winds tomorrow apparently.
I'm not dancing.
Sounds like a win to me.
Were the ducks just grabbed from a park?
I just need to bitch about my rental car for a second. It is a Jeep and I don't really know what you'd call it -- is this what a "crossover SUV" is? Smaller than most SUVs but larger than any car I've ever driven, looks like a Subaru? Anyway, major caveat: I'm used to my Volt, which I usually drive electric-only but it's a pretty responsive car even in gas mode. I vaguely remember that there was this automatic-transmission experience from decades ago, where you can more or less feel the car laboring to change gears and then give you the acceleration you requested. That's what this feels like. The acceleration curve is really unpredictable and involves sudden decay and sudden bursts of speed. I have been trying so, so hard to find the inflection points where the car will suddenly shoot forward, so I creep off the line at every green light and cringe as the engine roars to life 50 feet further. Please tell me, am I a total princess who can't drive or is this a shitty car? I don't even know anymore.
Jeep Compass? I got one as a rental once. Kind of ugly for a car.
I only ever rent cars, so I'm never sure what I'm driving, but half the things I rent (which are often crossovers or small SUVs because that's what's available) feel that way to me. You hit the gas to accelerate onto a highway and the car just fails to speed up for multiple seconds. I hate it. I don't care how fast a car can go -- if the top speed was whatever the local speed limit is plus five for passing I'd be fine -- but I do want it to have some pickup.
My old car, which is a Jeep, accelerates like a toaster strudel on valium. I would be more upset, but these days I've decided to own driving like my grandma (without crashing into the post office, I hope). Also, I don't drive much regardless.
re: 49
That was my experience driving rentals in the US. I got in one, which was some kind of biggish Toyota saloon, with, I think, something like a 3 litre engine. I got in and it made this big throaty engine noise, and I assumed it'd be fun to drive. It was absolutely godawful. Sluggish, slow, underpowered. I had to keep dropping it into some special low gear to get it to go up hills with any kind of speed, as if I left it in ordinary auto mode it just slowly crawled up the hill with the engine revs at some stupidly point. My (10 year old) 1.3 litre Suzuki would annihilate it: faster up hills, faster acceleration, much faster round corners, faster 0-60 time, everything. It was like comparing a sport car with a Model-T, except in this case, the sports car was a cheap second hand hatchback.
I think it's partly the automatic gear boxes, and partly the awful engines.
I drove a recent European-market Toyota with a modern automatic box in Malta, last summer, which was definitely better, but it was still short of driving a manual transmission version of a car with a similar sized engine.
The Toyota we have has buttons for how well it accelerates. There's "eco", "sporty", and probably some other ones.
Post? Ginger? I don't drive it much because I've been having trouble with parking garages lately.
re: 55
Yeah, the one I drove in Malta last year had those. I think I mostly left it in eco, but I did flip it into sporty a few times. I didn't massively have a problem with how fast it accelerated in a straight line, more with what seemed like slightly odd ratio choices that the automatic box seemed to make on hills, where it was revving higher and surging up and down the rev range in a way it wouldn't if I was driving a manual. I know the transmission is trying to be efficient, but the net effect was odd.
I have a little Hyundai and have kept the Eco mode on permanently as I have no problems with pickup getting onto the highway even in that mode. Maybe some people would (not people here I think).
52 is one of the reasons I prefer a manual transmission.
I want a car with three on the tree, but nobody makes them.
This probably isn't the right thread but there are a lot of smart people on here and I have a covid question.
I had covid in early March of 2020 and ended up with what I figured was long covid for more than a year through early summer of 2021 when almost all of the symptoms gradually faded away. I had severe muscle and joint pain, tightness in my upper lungs, some hearing loss, extreme fatigue and covid toes. I still have the covid toes.
I was just discussing this with someone when I realized I started to improve not long after receiving my second Moderna vaccination that April. Is it possible there could be a connection?
There's been lots of anecdotal reports of long covid symptoms improving or going away entirely after vaccination. I don't know that there's much non-anecdotal evidence for it, or that the mechanism is well-understood, but certainly it seems plausible that there's a connection.
For example, here's someone at Yale looking into this: https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/vaccines-long-covid
Wow, that was fast. Thank you for the link. I'll go back to lurking now.
That was a satisfying sequence of comments. Now can anyone help me identify the song on the tip of my tongue for the last few days?
It was a big pop hit maybe ten years ago and the gist of it was a 2nd person "you're a star/everyone wants to know who you are" and it had these distinctive ah ah ah ahs throughout the chorus. It's driving me crazy.
It probably wasn't Jason Derulo because he says his name at the beginning.
66: It does seem plausible enough that the immune response is enough different to matter.
It's not Josie and the Pussycats "You're a star" is it?
Not their best song, which is either true banger "3 Small Words" or the late great Adam Schlesinger's "Pretend to be Nice."
Is Schlesinger the only public figure who died of covid who was still doing great work?
Though those are clearly distinctive "nah nah nah nahs" in the chorus, not distinctive "ah ah ah ahs."
If we agree on Taylor and Josie I feel like I should be getting more music tips from Moby.
Or maybe we just need to start the Josieordle?
I have no taste. It's all my wife's iPad.
And my own private thoughts about Rachael Leigh Cook with cat ears.
Truly has everything you want in a movie. Funny. Great songs. Rachael Leigh Cook in cat ears. Runtime of 98 minutes.
It's like if "Mamma Mia! Here we go again" were 98 minutes long.
I haven't seen that. I'm allergic to that guy who always plays Mr. Darcy.
Someone must have made a cut where it's just the flashback parts without any of the present day parts, so no Mr Darcy. A big advantage of "Here we go again" is that the young versions of the dads can actually sing. But at any rate what you need is just:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHXL7yantDY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo0d4xk3BXw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GTjMMYl1T8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq_tO6NAlPI
It was a male singer in a kind of falsetto.
Also it was a hip-hop song, I think.
So my uncle died a little over an hour ago. Don't know what else to say. I'm glad I had that final chat with him. I wish I could have made it there.
Earlier today I made arrangements to have the antique rolltop desk he's leaving me shipped over here. I wrote them that it would likely be a couple of weeks...
92: I'm really glad you were able to talk to him too.
I am so sorry for your loss, Barry.
Condolences to you and your family, Barry.
Thank you all, I've memorialized him a bit here https://twitter.com/BarryFreedNYC/status/1495765678434963462
He was a truly unique character.
Sorry for your loss, Barry. That's a wonderful tribute to him.
That is a lovely thread, Barry, sorry to hear that.
That is a lovely thread, Barry, sorry to hear that.
Sorry for your loss, Barry. Sounds like he was a great guy.
Update: I crashed the terrible rental car. Although all comments above are true, I also can't drive. I am very, very, very sorry I potentially hurt the other driver in the sideswipe, but he fled and I had no way to help him, other than traveling back in time. It was 95% my bad decision to merge and 5% the rental car's failure to accelerate. I drove it back to the rental agency in tears, got a Lyft back to my dwelling, and am now sitting around completely alone refreshing the news as Russia invades Ukraine. I should probably have seen that last thing coming, but this day really did not go according to plan.
Sorry about that. That makes for a rough week. It doesn't sound like you hurt anyone if the other driver fled. They were probably playing Wordle on a phone or hauling Ivermetic that fell off the back of the horse.
They were probably just drunk. That's the first thing about drunk driving they teach, don't stop to talk to the police.
My drivers' ed teacher had many faults.
That was a lovely Twitter thread, Barry.