Ohio COVID-19 Trends Are Linear Not Exponential

Pew Research Center COVID-19 Graph 2020-05-20

When you look at this graph from the article, Coronavirus death toll is heavily concentrated in Democratic congressional districts, you can see that the trends in densely populated urban and suburban areas(Democratic districts) are vastly different trend than those in less densely populated districts(Republican districts). When I plotted the raw COVID-19 numbers from the Ohio COVID-19 site, it looks like a bunch of straight lines. So it is not a surprise that the best match for a trend line is a straight line. In the chart below the trend lines are such a good match you cannot tell the difference between raw data and the trend line for ICU, Hospitalizations, and Deaths.

I have been plotting this data for several weeks now. I was looking to see the downward trend in Ohio from the mitigation efforts. It looks like it will keep chugging along on this low rate. The good news is that that the ICU, hospitalization, and deaths for Ohio are low and manageable. I suspect that the current mitigation efforts work best in densely populated districts and long term care facilities with exponential increases. The rest of the country probably needs a plan that works for linear increases.