Covid-19 Stat Watching, Considered as a Fairgrounds Horse Race

Growing up, do you remember an amusement at the annual county or state fair that recreated a horse race in electronic form? 

Among the booths that featured a series of moving metal duck decoys you tried to shoot with a facsimile rifle . . . and the one that contained dozens of goldfish bowls you tried to toss a penny into . . . and the wall of balloons you tried to puncture with darts . . . and the tiny plastic duckies racing along a watercourse, each carrying a number on which you could place a bet to predict the winner . . . was a horse-racing game.

You’d pay money to compete by shooting a steel ball through a miniature pinball table-box that racked up points which translated into the progress of your horse in a race.

I remember a race that progressed via images of racehorses that lit up across the face of a wall from left to right — lighted holes in a metal screen, rather than strictly digital imagery . . . but this fair-use photo shows one that had actual horse-and-jockey models that tracked along a horizontal racetrack:

FOLLOWING THE NUMBERS

I am reminded of those horse arcades as I study the day-to-day stats of growing Covid-19 cases across my state (county by county) as well as the United States (state by state).

Day after day for the past week and a half, I’ve inspected and copied the numbers for the 36 counties in my state . . . and the 50 states (plus the territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Virgin Islands, which the source I consult has included). I watch the numbers shift upward together, and keep an eye out for shifts in ranking — when one county surpasses another, and one state leaps ahead of others — which is what reminded me of the horse race game.

Except that if you’re living in one of those states, your goal is the opposite of what it was at the fair: You want to go as slowly as you can . . . even come to a complete halt, if it were possible.

You want to lose. You even wish the entire race would grind to a halt without reaching whatever grisly but unknown finish line it’s headed for.

THE TEMPTATION OF SCHADENFREUDE

If you’re not familiar with it, the term “schadenfreude” (pronounced “SHAW-den-froyduh”) is one of those wonderfully useful words the Germans came up with to describe a complicated human emotional state. It refers to the pleasure (often secret) we feel when we see the misfortune of others.

Two weeks ago, many of us in the urban, blue-state regions of the country were outraged that rich college kids were partying for spring break on the beaches of Florida and streets of New Orleans, and presumably infecting one another with the virus to take home to them across the nation, at a time when we had already gone into self-isolation mode. (It didn’t take long for one of the more infamous partiers to walk back his viral comments and apologize.)

We were also infuriated that southern red-state governors as well as the President refused to mandate business shutdowns, or citizen self-quarantine . . . and continued to allow churches to hold mass services and treated gun stores as essential business operations. Georgia governor Brian Kemp made himself a national laughingstock Wednesday when he bowed to pressure to issue a stay-at-home order but added he was only just “finding out that this virus is now transmitting before people see signs.”

But now, it’s getting admittedly hard to avoid an impending sense of schadenfreude. Those scoffers may pay a price — a big one — for what the rest of us regarded as their former resistance and denial of reality. The “horse race” is showing those (mostly red, mostly southern) states — as well as at least one big north-Midwest state that made the mistake (in our humble opinion) of tipping in favor of the despicable incumbent in the last general election — coming up fast in the Covid-19 2020 Sweepstakes.

THE HORSE RACE IN OREGON

In my home state, the top three counties have stayed consistently the same. Washington, Marion, and Multnomah have steadily reported the highest number of identified coronavirus cases, at least in the 12 days I’ve checked (but likely prior to that, as well). I’ve qualified this as “identified” because testing has been inconsistent, incomplete, and therefore of limited value . . . though in Oregon’s case, reality is unlikely to have diverged far from what we’ve been able to see.

(My stats are all coming from the Oregon Health Authority’s Covid-19 page, which is updated “as of ... 8 a.m.” every day, although the actual updates have often not occurred until well into the afternoon.)

What’s interesting is that by far the most densely populated of the three — my own county of Multnomah, which includes most of downtown Portland — has NOT led the race for most of the past month. According to 2018 estimates cited on Wikipedia, population density in Multnomah is 1,874 per square mile, while in Washington it’s only 826 per square mile; the latter has fewer than 3/4 as many residents who are spread out over nearly twice as much area.

The first cases of Covid-19 infection in the state came to light in Washington County. The very first one, on Feb. 28, was a Washington County resident who happened to be employed at a school in Lake Owego, which is in Clackamas County to the south.

Washington County is the much more suburban strip mall/big grass lawns/high tech part of the Portland metro region. Nike world headquarters, Tektronix, many Intel facilities, and similar companies are there, as well as a string of middle-class bedroom communities for Portland metro. To the south, Lake Oswego is one of the whitest, wealthiest cities in the state, though Clackamas County also has pockets of poverty (as well as very UN-Portland conservative enclaves on its southern and eastern reaches).

Thus, the first investigations for the spread of coronavirus (and therefore testing) in Oregon likely occurred mostly in Washington and Clackamas, so that’s where the numbers of identified cases climbed first. Washington has remained out front the whole way. (Above are the totals as of Friday; the first column of numbers is total positive cases, the second figure is total deaths in that county, and the final column is total number of tests — the vast majority of them negatives, of course.)

Until recently, Marion County — which is home to the state capital, Salem, as well as a number of state prisons — was in second. Multnomah, which took a little longer both to identify contagion and to gain access to substantial testing, only just moved into second place on Saturday, April 4 (compare the figures on that date, below, to the ones cited above).

WHAT’S HAPPENING FURTHER OUT

In the rest the state, as of yesterday, 7 of the state’s 36 counties still reported zero positive tests — though in aggregate, they have had 432 tests. Coos County, on the south Pacific Coast where I lived in my teens and graduated from high school, has seen a lot of nervous testing relative to its ostensible clean bill of health: 232, so far . . . though the results may not be conclusive. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that false negatives could be running as high as one-third.

Other pockets of relatively higher numbers — crawling upward in the zone between the “big three” and most of the rest of the state, two-thirds of whose counties still report zero or single-digit totals (always keeping in mind the relative inaccessibility and paucity of testing) — are Linn County (including Albany, 11th largest city in the state, but likely home to many students and families associated with Oregon State University, less than a dozen miles west and just over the border in Benton County: 43 cases as of Sunday) . . . Deschutes County (home to Bend, Sun River, and other recently fast-growing retirement centers, especially for southern Californians, we hear: 39 cases on Sunday) . . . Jackson County (Medford, the state’s fourth largest metro area, plus Ashland, the artsy-craftsy liberal refuge where my mother and brother Ken live: 33) . . . Lane County (surprisingly lagging, given that it contains the state’s second largest city of Eugene and the University of Oregon: 27) . . . and Polk County (which has the western side of the state capital of Salem: 24).

You can see most of those individual totals in the final chart excerpt above.

Next: the national horse race of Covid-19 cases. . . .