I have made a program that can also make COVID tables for the states of the US. I take the opportunity to examine what a large number of graphs will look like together.
Would that make a difference if you show them next to the blue (Biden) states?
Together these figures lead to a graph for the US.
[I based it on the figures from the EU data portal. That has a different way (than that of The Atlantic‘s covid tracking project that I used for the states in the US) to register infections. There, the number of hospital admissions is taken as an indicator of infections instead of registered positive tests. This means that their ratios of infections / deaths is different (1/4, 1/100)]. It will look like this graph in the first week of 2021.
So what? If you look at the picture for the US until October 2020 and let yourself mainly be guided by the curves (the trend), you can imagine that your assessment came out to be: acceptable (around the beginning of October). Trump thought so at the time, even when he was not quite able to defend this in an unexpected critical interview that was allowed to him by Fox News. Let’s reconstruct the chart for the US as it looked at the beginning of October.
It is conceivable that with this perspective (the knowledge at the time) an argument in the direction of not too bad / things under control could be taken seriously if it were not the case that at the time the number of COVID deaths per day was around 800 and the total COVID deaths had just passed 200,000. When reading these graphs, not only the shape (the trend) but also the levels are important.
It appears that our return to the old normal depends on how flat we can have the trend at the 0 level. That is, we must have found and accepted the means and behavioral habits to get it that way and to keep it that way. That does minimally require that we collectively understand what exponential growth is and how it works in terms of COVID.
When I observe our countless TV talk shows for pundits and politicians, the fulfillment of that condition seems far away.