While we don’t really have the sentinel surveillance in place to get really good estimates on the prevalence of COVID-19 infections (the number of currently infected people), we can use some proxies. One proxy is the two-week prevalence of COVID-19 cases (the number of new cases in a two-week period divided by the population of the area you’re interested in), provided there is adequate testing. This is also a statistic the European CDC uses, and, in the U.S., when I’m able to find data such as surveys of non-COVID-19 patients in hospitals, seems to match up reasonably well. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, don’t quibble over the point estimates since these are proxies, but they should give you an idea of where we are.

We can start to feel we’ve turned the corner at a prevalence of 0.05%, and we can start to do some risky stuff at 0.01%.

So how is the U.S. doing? Well, let’s look at prevalence from June 30 to July 13 (COVID-19 data are from here*; population numbers are from here, except for a couple of the territories):

Keep in mind, some states are probably considerably higher than this, if their testing capacity is overwhelmed (this site gives a good roundup of testing capacity).

Very few states cross the 0.05% threshold, with only 43.9 million Americans living in those states or territories (thirteen percent). Only two territories, American Samoa, which has no cases, and the Northern Marianas Islands are below the 0.01% level (I’m guessing many Americans don’t even know the Northern Marianas Islands are part of the U.S.–or that they even exist). To put this in perspective, Hong Kong is losing its shit (that’s a highly technical phrase) after their two-week prevalence surged to… 0.003%.

We Americans really need to understand how poorly we’re doing at this. And it didn’t need to be like this. Anger is the appropriate emotion.

*This site sometimes has a small lag, but it’s easy to download, so I used it.