Rural Cities Overtake NYC in per Capita Covid-19 Cases | Hacker News Reader

Rural Cities Overtake NYC in per Capita Covid-19 Cases

cybercoastal.com

60 pointsOrganizedChaos20 comments

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This post is from a NYTimes story from about a month ago:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/23/upshot/five-w...

Those very few limited rural cities that were ahead of NYC at the time had things like prisons and meat packing plants.

The NY Times has a bunch of stats here they keep updated, including current Per Capita numbers:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-c...

Yep, that's true where I'm from. The county has a total of maybe a dozen or so cases. But we have two correctional facilities that have almost an order of magnitude more. The next city over has hundreds of cases, but they also have a meat packing plant where most of these are (in addition to their own correctional facilities and one or more federal ones).

There's per-state incidence and hospitalization rates on the global JHU dashboard: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594...

The implication of the title, that rural cities in general have overtaken NYC isn't necessarily backed up by the data, unless it can be shown to be a pattern in a huge number of rural cities, such the the combined population of those reaches a level of statistical significance. The data in the NYT article also shows more rural cities that have lower case rates than NYC.

The more likely scenario is that these rural cities with higher case rates than NYC represent their own individual outbreaks of the pandemic. That might become more of a pattern, especially as shelter-in-place restrictions are increasingly lifted, but it's too early to make that prediction.

The observation actually perfectly fits a statistical principle that you're just going to see more extremes (lower and larger per capital cases) in smaller populations because probability.

I'd cast just as much doubt on stats showing low cases/1000 in small cities and towns and subsequent predictions that small towns won't be affected.

I don't think we have enough data in those places to know the patterns either way, especially since the situation is changed daily. The dynamics of this disease aren't well understood enough. Earlier it was thought that the heat of the southern hemisphere was protecting it, but now Latin America is seeing a large rise in cases.

EDIT: removed my comment about low sample size and high variance, since the case rate is just a about cases/100 people, not based on a sampling procedure.

Headlines are always ambiguous-they are too short to be otherwise.

My reading of it was definitely not "rural cities in general" but rather just some rural cities. I can see the ambiguity, but I think it's important to read headlines with the understanding that they will never be a substitute for the story.

Not sure how one can read news online in 2020 and not understand that the majority of people only read the headlines and they are used to push narratives. They could have prepended the word "Some".

Shouldn't the headline say "Three Small Cities..." because it implies that "rural cities" as a category have overtaken New York City in per capita Covid-19 cases, which is false.

I'm not sure this is meaningful. Marion Ohio, for example, has 36,837 people (66,000 people in the county). The whole county has had 23 deaths. That works out to 35-62 deaths per 100,000 (depending on how many were in the city versus the rest of the county). NYC is at 205 deaths per 100,000.

It maybe due to NY's policy at the start of the outbreak, which put recovering Covid patients in nursing homes. It probably spiked their death count without causing a corresponding spike in cases.

Direct anchor link to the NYT source data table: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/23/upshot/five-w...

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Then why can't I close the dialog box asking me to sign up and view the reported data?

You don't have to subscribe but you do have to sign up. It doesn't cost any money to make an account.

Rural Cities is an oxymoron. If it's a city, by definition, it's not rural.

You could say 'smaller cities' or any number of other things.

TLDR: Three rural cities.

Given some basic assumptions about the distribution of case rates, it's not at all surprising that a few cities from that fairly large set happen to exceed NYC.

Nothing to see here.

Agreed. How can a media outlet can extrapolate this into the title is incredible to me.

Probably why the label that gets thrown around of "fake media" is so sticky

Here's another beauty: https://twitter.com/pewresearch/status/1265636238255669252?s...

Good grief. I bet the number of murders in NYC dropped more than in Paducah during all this as well. Let's hear it for New York! :-P

Particularly shameful coming from Pew, who I think of as one of the last fairly neutral sources.

For a while now there has been a concerted effort to find another bad hotspot to focus media attention on.

First it was Florida, which was going to be far worse than Italy. Then it was Georgia, because they were opening far too soon. Now I guess they're just saying "Rural".

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