Weekly Update: How #COVID19 has spread across every U.S. state & territory per capita over time

A picture is worth 1,000 words and all that.

I was doing this earlier in the summer but stopped updating it in August; I've started over with a fresh spreadsheet and have expanded it to include every U.S. territory, including not just DC & Puerto Rico but also American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and even the Northern Mariana Islands.

I've done my best to label every state/territory, which obviously isn't easy to do for most of them given how tangled it gets in the middle. The most obvious point is that New York and New Jersey, which towered over every other state last spring, are now utterly dwarfed by North & South Dakota, which are skyrocketing.

North Dakota recently became the first state to cross the 10% infection threshold, with South Dakota not far behind. Iowa, Wisconsin, Nebraska and Utah could all potentially hit the 10% milestone by New Year's Eve as well.

Next, let's look at the cumulative mortality rate for every U.S. state and territory. Here, New Jersey and New York are still far worse than the rest of the country due to their mass deaths from March - May this past spring...but as you can see, several other states are, tragically, also catching up to them on this front as well.

COVID will likely have killed 1 out of every 500 New Jersey residents by the end of the year...but there are five other states where COVID-19 has killed at least 1 out of every 750 residents (New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Louisiana and Rhode Island), and five others, which have all lost at least 1 out of every 1,000 residents to the pandemic, are about to join that club (Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, Illinois and my home state of Michigan).