Originally Posted by
fourfa
Just a heads up, there's a lot of useful info in this map (the default output of the Johns Hopkins tracker if I had to guess) but also some (probably unintentionally) misleading info. All Canadian cases in this visualization are grouped into one dot
per province, placed in some fictional geographic midpoint. All US cases are
per-county, which is a much much smaller unit. Imagine instead that all the US cases were per-state and lumped into an arbitrary point in space - it would look quite different. Mexico looks to be per-state, the Caribbean is per-country; perhaps this is how the info is available but as a visualization it's problematic.
If we compare to the general Canadian population-density map:
We can immediately see that the case visualization is misleading.
Please do not misinterpret me, Canada is by
many measures doing a substantially better job than the US. For instance 24 deaths per 100k people, vs 40 in the US (though also 8.1% case-fatality rate vs US 4.4% according to
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality on today's date).
I fully support the point of your post - if I was in Canada right now I wouldn't dream of coming to the US. But it's possible that you're more inside the bubble than you might think from the map you shared. Please do be careful!
The graphic isn't misleading. It just demonstrates the inconsistency between two neigbouring countries dealing with the same pandemic. Today in BC we had 18 new cases and 3 deaths from Covid. It would be difficult to create a graphic that illustrates that by municipality (your county equivalent) so they just use one small dot per province. The US is adding 50,000+ cases a day now. In total Canada has 8700 deaths compared to 134,000+. The map has to be simplified on the Canadian side to be able to show any sort of comparison. That should alarm you, not be a tangent to debate.
I work in front line health care in one of the largest Long Term Care Facilities in Western Canada where I also serve as the senior F/A attendant, member of the JOHS (joint occupational health and safety committee) and as a worker rep for the Emergency Covid Response Team. There we receive information and mandates from the Provincial and Regional health authorities and translate them into policy for our facility. So far, thankfully, we have kept the virus out of our campus that has 700 residents and 600 staff. Statistically, that's amazing. It calls for a lot of luck and individual sacrifice like wearing masks and goggles 8 hours a day, changing clothes before and after shifts, no outside food, no family visitation, no large group activities or entertainment. The bubble I have lived almost exclusively in for the last four months is the ever evolving best practice medical model to prevent the spread of Covid 19.
Please, stop arguing whether the data is misleading in some sort of way or another and acknowledge the elephant on the room. How to deal with it is well known and has been demonstrated to work. The only thing up for debate is how to quickly put it into practice.