Diseases which stop at borders

A great example of honest and open inquiry without ideological axes to grind.  From Michigan: America's Covid Outlier by el gato malo.  Recall that ell gato malo was banned from Twitter for following the data.  He has several questions arising from this map from the New York Times about Covid in Michigan.

Double click to enlarge.

What's happening with Michigan?  More specifically, given that the data is collected at the county level, the red hot spots ought to be blurring across state borders.  But they don't.  Cases stop at the border.

That of course suggests that we don't have an infection issue, we have a data or definition issue.  Which is what el gato malo is speculating about along with his commenters.

It is a genuine mystery and could have one or many joint possible causes.  That conversation is what is happening freely in the comments on Substack in a way it could not in the traditional media beholden to ideologies and narratives.

As el gato malo points out (my capitalization)

If one then looks at the data from the Michigan ER admits, a very different pattern emerges. All ER’s now track admission for covid like illness (CLI). They also track covid diagnoses. this can be expressed as a percentage of all ER admissions. (raw data HERE)

In the past, we saw more alignment between CLI symptoms and covid diagnosis, but this really blew out starting in october, then dropped back down some, then really blew out again.

This is not typical of any respiratory disease i have ever heard of.  Even a 2:1 ratio of diagnosis to symptoms is enough to make you wonder about over-testing and false positives, but 7:1 is simply beyond the pale.

This means 1000 people walk in, 15 claim to have CLI symptoms, and 105 get a covid diagnosis.

Legitimate questions.  Something is amiss in Michigan and it might not be Covid-19.  To determine the real cause of such aberrant data, we need good minds freely exploring alternative explanations, not deplatforming, cancelling or suppression. 

I encountered this when I was doing research on urban campers and the homeless.  When you look at the data (collected at the county level) you can see dramatically different rates of homelessness across county borders as if homelessness were governed by borders on a map.  

The reality of course is that different counties pursue different policies.  If you have elevated homelessness at a local level, it is due to local policies, and not due to the economy or capitalism, or any of the abstract but inaccurate suppositions.