Hotspots

 Looking at the chart attached to this tweet, it's pretty clear that the pandemic is actually a series of especially virulent outbreaks and then some small, contained cases. The Italian outbreak was really the Lombardy outbreak with some spillover into Piedmont and Romagna. The lockdown of Italy effectively froze the virus in its tracks in the rest of the country, including the poor (and poorly governed) south of Italy. The national response crushed the hotspot into one place.

In the US we had the greater NYC outbreak of March and April. The lack of a national response allowed the virus to circulate in the background of May and June. Currently, we have a second epidemic in California, Texas, Florida and Georgia. (If we adjust for population size, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Nevada and South Carolina emerge as hotspots. Meanwhile, the Northeast and Greater NYC largely look like Europe. 

This isn't so much a "second wave" and we don't know what that will look like. This is, instead, a first wave for the Sunbelt. Only Louisiana is truly passing through a "second wave" since they got slammed in the spring and are getting slammed again. My guess is that the spring was largely contained to New Orleans, but the second wave is hitting the rural part of the state. Tough to find county level data that makes sense.

Until there is a vaccine, we will likely be dealing with outbreaks. South Korea is currently seeing an outbreak that has led to 166 new cases. Even New Zealand is seeing a spike in cases, but in both countries, aggressive test-and-trace have managed to limit the spread so far. For the Northeast, that will be key as schools re-open. Being able to test and trace does not mean the virus does not spread. It will.  We are seeing that in countries that responded well in the spring, and the parts of the US that learned the lessons of the spring, too. Italy reported 4 new cases today. Texas had 8,000 new cases yesterday.

Covid won't "just disappear," it requires hard work to keep in top of every new outbreak. Right now, in the Sunbelt the virus is simply out of any sort of control.