COVID in Washington state, county-level (December 8th, 2020)

3 min readDec 9, 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 is holding a steady below-average position against the whole country

King county returns towards the state average despite a dip

Spokane County is tracking with the national average

All counties ranked by trailing average case per 100k as of 12/8/2020

Here is a ranked list of all counties as of 12/8/2020. 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.