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For months, many have been baffled by how the United States, among the richest and most technologically capable countries on the planet, can simply lead the world in shown cases of COVID-19 and in the resulting deaths. They have pointed their fingers in many directions, from apathetic political leadership to intractable cultural attitudes. But there is something else that has undoubtedly made the United States an easy target for viral catastrophe: the country’s 328 million inhabitants are scattered throughout its many states, districts, and territories, with their own viral containment technique. We’re not fighting a bachelor epidemic, we’re fighting more than 50.
More than one observer has compared the country’s war against coronavirus to a Whack-a-Mole Game: every time the curve flattens in one state, it ends in others, like a hurricane with no sense of direction or fatigue. To visualize this phenomenon geographically, TIME traced the wandering eye of this infectious typhoon by calculating, by the day until the end of February, the midpoint of the epidemic: the exact location in the United States from where some of the reported new cases were to the west and the other side were to the east, and the same for the north and south (what the demographers call the middle center). Here’s what it looks like:
As expected, the inner trail of Hurricane COVID begins in the upper northwest. This is where the first case demonstrated in the U.S. was reported. On January 20 in Snohomish County, Washington, a few weeks after the virus gave the impression in Wuhan, China. After a slow era of expansion in February, the “eye” began its advance southward in California, a few weeks before the Grand Princess docked at the port of Oakland on March 9 with 103 inflamed passengers on board.
At the same time, the instances expanded in the 3 states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, probably after travelers brought the disease from Europe, opening a moment of combat theater. “The virus had triggered multiple attacks in the United States,” as two of my colleagues wrote about those spikes on opposite shores. As the rate of new cases in the west began to stabilize, confined spaces around New York experienced waves that temporarily caught the attention of Hurricane COVID across the country.
Then the eye flew over New York’s rule until mid-April. It is remarkable to see the average length (vertical line) so close to this access point, because for many days, the domain of the 3 states necessarily had as many new instances as the rest of the country to the west and south. Training
Then, a wave in and around Chicago, combined with an imaginable flattening of the curve in New York, drew the western line until mid-May, when a steep peak in Los Angeles began pulling the mid-latitude south. At the time, some states, such as Virginia, were beginning to think of a warm reopening of public spaces like beaches and parks until Memorial Day.
In June, many southern regions that had not yet experienced the worst of the pandemic began to reopen prematurely. Soon, Texas, Arizona and Florida were the new hot spots, attracting the center to the south and west as Southern California continued to suffer. From last June to mid-July, the eye attracted through an Arkansas-centered tug-of-war amid a buildup of cases in the Carolinas.
It is vital to note that the location of our central point does not illustrate a wave of instances at that specific location. Rather, it is the theoretical midpoint that evenly divides the total number of new infections in both directions. Arkansas, for example, was strong when it was in the geographic center of the epidemic, and reported an average of about 20 cases in line with another 100,000 people according to the day, specifically less than in several neighboring states.
Now, with COVID-19 declining in much of the deep south, the eye is moving north toward The Heartland as instances accumulate in parts of the Midwest. However, the position in which the eye sits is much less applicable than the still-remote hope that the virus will prevent it from spreading completely.