COVID in Washington state, county-level (December 27th, 2020)

Sky
3 min readDec 29, 2020

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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

As of 12/27, Washington state as a whole is about 30 less cases per 100k than the entire country. (56.3 per 100k vs 26.2 per 100k).

Washington State trailing average of new cases per 100k (26.2 on 12/27) vs USA (56.3 on 12/27)

King County stays below the state average

With 18.5 new cases per 100k on 12/27, King County is staying below the state average.

King County trailing average shows 18.5 new cases per 100k on 12/27

Spokane County new cases counts trend high above the state average

There is some volatility in the graph, but this might be due to count corrections as can be see in the raw case counts which show zero on the 24th and 25th of December. Meanwhile, on 12/27, Spokane averages to 41 new cases per 100k, ~15 more than the state average.

Spokane County’s new cases per 100k on 12/27 measures at 41.

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

Trending more than 20 cases more than the entire country, Yakima currently is 56.3 cases per 100k.

Yakima is #1 in the state with 79 new cases per 100k (The US is only 56.3 in comparison)

All counties ranked by trailing average case per 100k as of 12/27/2020

Here is a ranked list of all counties as of 12/27/2020. 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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