Covid-19: An Historical Comparison And A Useful Map

This will be brief. The historical comparison is--of course--to the Spanish Influenza pandemic. The one that didn't actually come from Spain Rebecca Grant has a nice article on the subject at Fox: Coronavirus lessons from 1918 Spanish flu – here's what worked to save lives. Would you be surprised to learn that the same measures being used today were the measures that were successful in mitigating Spanish flu? Me neither. And the localities that failed to implement things like social distancing measures paid a very heavy price. Those who are ignorant of history end up repeating it. Libertarian ideology is built on ignorance of history, just like Socialism.

It's a very nice article and I urge you to read it.

Now, on to the very useful map: US Health Weather Map. You can play around with this map endlessly or you can go straight for the jugular by entering your zip code. You start out with the country as a whole, but then you can narrow in as you please.

The map shows two key data points: (1) the illness levels we’re currently observing, and (2) the degree to which those levels are higher than the typical levels we expect to see at this point in the flu season.

Please note: We are not stating that this data represents COVID-19 activity. However, we would expect to pick up higher-than-anticipated levels of flu-like symptoms in our data in areas where the pandemic is affecting large numbers of people. Taken together with other data points, we believe this data may be a helpful early indicator of where and how quickly the virus is spreading.

Keep an eye on Florida.