I notice that the US state doing the best with the pandemic is the one that's nearly entirely surrounded by Canada.
But it's really hard to draw inferences from positivity rates. The rates are based on people who are either given a test by a hospital, or by random people who decide to show up to a testing site. Since so many of the respondents are self-selected, there's no way to draw a clear inference to the infection rate in the population as a whole. Also the CDC's guidance on how to administer the test is different from the WHO, and much more likely to produce a false negative. Also the government directed hospitals to no longer provide numbers to the CDC, and send it directly to the White House instead. They had to declare backsies on that, but I wouldn't consider US government figures on the virus reliable any longer.
The only truly reliable data is the total death rate. If you include the excess deaths, it's likely that coronavirus deaths have already passed 175000 in the US, which doesn't take into account the current surge in new hospitalizations. I think, by the end of the year, that number is likely to exceed the deaths inflicted by the Civil War. So in a small sense, the Boogaloo people are right, except that the war already started and it's being fought with masks instead of guns.
But it's really hard to draw inferences from positivity rates. The rates are based on people who are either given a test by a hospital, or by random people who decide to show up to a testing site. Since so many of the respondents are self-selected, there's no way to draw a clear inference to the infection rate in the population as a whole. Also the CDC's guidance on how to administer the test is different from the WHO, and much more likely to produce a false negative. Also the government directed hospitals to no longer provide numbers to the CDC, and send it directly to the White House instead. They had to declare backsies on that, but I wouldn't consider US government figures on the virus reliable any longer.
The only truly reliable data is the total death rate. If you include the excess deaths, it's likely that coronavirus deaths have already passed 175000 in the US, which doesn't take into account the current surge in new hospitalizations. I think, by the end of the year, that number is likely to exceed the deaths inflicted by the Civil War. So in a small sense, the Boogaloo people are right, except that the war already started and it's being fought with masks instead of guns.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto