The different "state" of affairs of COVID in America.

As you probably know, the USA is the world leader in COVID-19 cases and deaths, and even on population-adjusted terms it is among the harder-hit countries (2,200 cases and 116 deaths per million citizens). But as you also probably know, the biggest impacts have centered around New York City, with hundreds of thousands of cases and tens of thousands of deaths just around that one city. So, my question this afternoon was: just how bad is New York's situation relative to the rest of the country, and what does the USA look like if we remove the fallout from New York City from the equation?

To answer the question, let's look at the USA apart from the state of New York as well as New Jersey and Connecticut, since these states are highly connected with New York City both economically and culturally. According to Worldometer, these states together account for 339,270 reported COVID cases and 22,777 deaths. Meanwhile, the rest of the country has reported 389,023 cases and 15,467 deaths. The tri-state area thus accounts for a whopping 46.6% of all reported cases and 59.6% of reported deaths in the entire United States. That's with only around 9.1% of the US population within these states' boundaries!

Those rates are absolutely staggering. The tri-state area has 11,343 cases and 761.5 deaths per million citizens (again, relative to 2,200 and 116 for the country as a whole). And when you remove these states from the national picture, the situation in the rest of the USA looks very different: just 1,304 cases and 51.9 deaths per million citizens. (For reference, Germany has had about 53 deaths per million citizens, and is widely seen as among the world leaders in containing the virus.) Even if you just focus on the states that have been hardest hit outside of these three—namely, Louisiana and Massachusetts—you are looking at around half as many cases and deaths per million citizens as in the tri-state area.

Now, I know a lot of folks have been making political hay out of this crisis on all sides, and I don't want to try to draw out any implications of that nature from this exercise. But it does seem worth pointing out that when we talking about COVID-19 in the United States, we are really talking about two completely different things. One conversation is about the catastrophic situation that has unfolded in New York City and its surrounding area, and the other is about the completely different situation in pretty much every other part of the country.