Fact of the Day: California Is Doing Better Than Most on COVID-19

Test ticker

Monika Bauerlein,
CEO

Dear Reader,

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December is make-or-break for Mother Jones’ fundraising, and in "No Cute Headlines or Manipulative BS," we hope that giving it to you as matter-of-fact as we can will work to raise the $350,000 we need to raise this month. Donations make up 74 percent of our budget this year, and all online gifts will be matched and go twice as far until we hit our goal.

Here in California, new lockdowns and travel restrictions are the order of the day. This extreme response to rising COVID-19 cases is based on ICU capacity, so it’s perfectly reasonable. However, it’s prompted a spate of articles about how the coronavirus is “raging out of control” in California with an astonishing 22,000 new cases recorded yesterday.

I don’t understand. This is roughly 10 percent of all new cases in the country, and California has a little more than 10 percent of the US population. It’s basically what you’d expect. To test this, I made a chart (of course I did):

This shows two things. First, as goes the country, so goes California. We’re just following the overall trend. Second, for the past couple of months we’ve been substantially below the national average. I suppose you can say that cases in California are “raging out of control” simply because COVID-19 is raging out of control practically everywhere, but that’s pretty deceptive. In fact, California is doing relatively well. As of yesterday, we were about one-quarter below the national average.

So what’s with the news coverage? Can’t these folks do simple division?