Thread by @tomaspueyo

How is hard work against the #coronavirus wasted without a good Fence? Thread

One of my fav parts of the Fences article is visualizing this. The US is perfect: states took all the measures. Some harder than others, but few adopted good fences

nytimes.com/interactive/20…
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As a result, you get states with expensive lockdowns that were completely wasted by travelers bringing infections from outside... during the lockdown!

Connecticut is one of the best examples. This happened during its lockdown (represented as a yellow border with stripes inside)

You can see the spread going from left — close to NY — to right as days pass, despite the lockdown.

Obviously, correlation is not causation. Maybe it's caused by some other factor?

That's why we went looking for more states — and more smoking guns.

Next one: New Mexico
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Look what happened in the south, in Doña Ana county, NM, near El Paso, TX.

Again, NM was under lockdown, but TX wasn't. And you have a surge of cases in El Paso, which bleed into Doña Ana.

But this visualization doesn't make it so obvious. Let's try something else.
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Forget the Northwest for a moment and look at the rest of the state. Lockdowns represented as bold black borders.

You can see prevalence in counties go up and down during the lockdown, but in Doña Ana it starts just after El Paso's, and never goes down.
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This trend becomes especially obvious when you look at active cases per county (extracting Navajo Nation and the capital, Albuquerque).

You see one outlier, Otero. That's a prison and detention center outbreak.

Aside from that, look at Doña Ana vs. El Paso
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They correlate perfectly! Note that El Paso cases are in a different axis: It had 7 times more cases than Doña Ana, but adjusting axes allows to show this clear correlation.

And cases were coming from El Paso to DA, not the other way around (much higher caseload & prevalence)

Now let's go to Navajo Nation.
The outbreak started on the Arizona side, and expanded across to New Mexico and Utah

https://twitter.com/tomaspueyo/status/1299499703122288640?s=20

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Overall, New Mexico was fighting hard with a super long-lasting lockdown, and yet it was getting infested in cases through Texas and Arizona

https://twitter.com/tomaspueyo/status/1299499701746556929?s=20

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The same thing happened to at least two more states, Oregon and Nevada. Let's look at Oregon first.

Here you can clearly see how cases start in Seattle at the beginning of March. By the end of the month, they've spread southeast all the way to the border with Oregon
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By then, Oregon is in lockdown. Doesn't matter. In April, cases start popping up just in the counties that touch Washington's high-prevalence areas, but not in the rest of Oregon counties. It really looks like cases come from WA.
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Coincidentally, migrant workers are thought to be the ones bringing the outbreak to the county.
nytimes.com/interactive/20…

Now look at the bottom right of the state.
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Malheur County gets infections just as Boise, Idaho and its surroundings are getting their outbreaks.

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Nevada is the same. You have Las Vegas—which probably got its cases internationally — but as it closes borders, its West and Northeast borders both get outbreaks.

Here, Washoe County, which likely got infected from ppl fleeing the Bay Area
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Very little is said of Elko County, NV. The few things mentioned include there were cases close to Utah, and that Southern Idaho also had cases early on before Elko had any. The first death was in a town bordering with Utah.

elkodaily.com/news/local/sou…

So you have at least Connecticut, Nevada, Oregon & New Mexico that were fighting the coronavirus internally and yet didn't want to erect a Fence with travelers from out of state and as a result got their hard work wasted.

If I were a resident of one of these states, I'd be angry

I'll keep doing more of these breakdowns of the Fences article this week. Follow me to get them.
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