In my previous post, I was wondering if Maryland was ready to reopen, ready to enter Stage 1 of COVID-19 recovery. I also mentioned, in the end, that if Gov. Hogan announced the reopening of Maryland, he also gave counties the power to “fully” open, to be partially open or even to remain closed. You can see more info about Maryland Strong: Roadmap to Recovery: there is a map of what Counties decided.

Here is a first attempt to look at the fate of the different counties. My idea here is to set the number of cases in all counties on May 14, 2020 (start date of Stage 1) to 100% and see how counties evolve in terms of number of new daily cases.

On top of the figure below, I represent the cumulative, 7-day average (*) daily new COVID-19-confirmed cases in the different counties of Maryland. The chart at the bottom assign the number of daily cases on May 14, 2020 to 100% for each state and follow the % evolution over the next day. In this chart, the blue lines represents counties that follow Stage 1 (e.g. Garrett or Ken), the green line represents counties that partially follow Stage 1 (e.g. Anne Arundel or Frederick) and the red line represents counties that remain “closed” (Baltimore City, Charles, Prince Georges and Montgomery). The counties that remain closed are the ones that have the most cases and deaths.

I must say that 6 days after Stage 1 (May 20), there is no clear trend. First, it’s normal because any downward or upward trend in number of cases will take a few day to appear (transmission or absence of transmission, incubation, decision to consult and tests, and lag in test reporting). It’s too early to see something. We will also see a confounding factor with the recent decision by the Governor to allow testing of people who do not present any symptoms (in some testing sites). Nevertheless, I was expecting to “see something”; here it just seems it’s the same.

But another reason for “not seeing anything” might be that the cases are not a relevant metric. We can already see that it is fluctuating widely every day. There are even days when less cases were reported than the day before (it might have been a data entry error on my side). The only other parameter that the MDH displays in its dashboard is the number of deaths by counties. I plotted this and it’s the same bizarre chart. How to improve this? Any idea? Don’t hesitate to comment below or to send me an email.

Update on May 24, 2020: I updated the chart of cases after Stage 1 (see above). Currently the confidence intervals (the shades) are so overlapping that differences that we could see are meaningless. Cases may not be a good metric.

I also created the same chart for deaths (see below). Here we see clearly a positive picture: in all counties that are partially open or closed, the mean number of deaths is decreasing. Note however that we are only 10 days (today is 5/24) from May 15 and this may just be a trend that existed before and not something new due to the decision to remain (partially) closed.

In counties that are in Stage 1, the mean number of deaths is actually increasing. The same comment applies: it may be too early to actually see an impact of the opening (especially deaths could be far from the case detection). Besides, the confidence intervals (the blue shades) are very wide. Hopefully things may become clearer in a few days (and for the best, given we are talking about a disease and people dying from it).

To be continued …

As usual, you’ll find other graphs on my page about COVID-19 in Maryland and the data, code and figures are on Github.
(*) the 7-day average uses the arithmetic mean of each county series over the past 7 observations.

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