COVID in Washington state, county-level (3/29/2021)

Sky
3 min readMar 31, 2021

Here are charts for Washington State counties. These charts rely on the New York Times’ published data on COVID-19 in the United States. I am primarily use their county-level data set together with population estimates (Wikipedia reports on US Census data from 2019).

I have produced charts of new cases of COVID-19 as

  • 7-day trailing averages
  • scaled to cases per 100k.

Google sheets link

All of my charts and tables are shared in a public Google sheets document:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kNc6XTZSKerv5-Uk2kgoMUXPQHPjHKsLq0fMSZMkyuw/edit?usp=sharing

Charts

Washington State maintains a consistent below-average count compared to the USA

In the past 14 days, Washington State has sustained an average of 7.2 cases less than whole country.

There still is a rise in average Washington State cases, King County is a contributor to that.

on 3/29/2021, King County’s average is 13.34 new cases. Washington State averages 11.82 new cases. The US averages 19.89.

Spokane County is roughly following the state average.

This is Spokane’s best position compared to the state average since Fall 2020.

Charts show that Spokane has been hovering above and below the state average for the past 14 days.

Whitman leads the state in new cases (well above the country average itself)

Charts showing an influx of new cases for Whitman that push it to ~14 more cases per 100k than the US average.

All counties ranked by trailing average case per 100k as of 3/29/2020

Here is a ranked list of all counties as of 3/29/2020. I have added the nation and Washington State as a whole to help contextualize the numbers.

Notes

I chose trailing averages and scaled to population (“per 100k”) to help readers identify how COVID-19 is trending in each chart and to allow readers to make fairly direct comparisons county-to-county.
These charts compare each county against the entire state. This allows us to say whether or not a county has generally been doing better or worse than the rest of the state. I am using the trailing averages and trend line comparison to mitigate the way that testing patterns have changed since the early months.
I have refrained from speculation about the reasons for each county’s performance in this post and concentrated on simple language: above vs below average and a month to month comparison.

Links

Google sheet of WA counties
WACovid-Charts
Google sheet with all King County cities
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16HXKTs5ZPGFnli3FRcTALsA40CovxCQoS-JF2GrETaY/edit?usp=sharing
Subreddit with daily reports from various contributors
https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusWA/

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