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Apr 6, 2021Liked by polimath

The variants are a son of a bitch, especially if a state hasn't been hit particularly hard in the past. If you look north to canada, currently the entire country is surging and is being locked down till the end of april, clearly seasonality of the virus is the single biggest predictor of spread, which is why 40,000 people in texas can go to a baseball game, but I can't go to a restaurant (Montreal resident). Michigans already showing signs of their peak slowing, so i think by the end of the month the entire Northern part of North America will be in the final phases of Covid, but the south needs to vaccinate hard and fast to avoid another summer surge.

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Apr 6, 2021Liked by polimath

How much of the national increase in cases is explained (in the statistical sense) by the Michigan (and maybe Iowa) numbers? Stories this last week reporting an emerging surge imply that the the increases are happening broadly, but could there be regional spikes that are outliers? I'm not suggesting they can be ignored; they might just be the earliest indications of something that could happen later in many more states. Alternatively, could regional differences be contributing to increases that may not occur in other places?

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You described Florida's performance vs COVID as average, which it is if you just look at the basic numbers. Do you think there's merit in the argument that Florida did better than average given the high percentage of senior citizens living there? Or is that cancelled out by the fact that Florida's weather doesn't force people to stay indoors as much as happens in most states during the winter? (The more I look at it the more I'm thinking that there are too many factors tied up in how the virus spreads and without detailed transmission tracking and contact tracing data to work with, all of the state by state aggregate numbers are next to meaningless.)

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