Vox
The US is now in the middle of what can only be described as a national Covid-19 epidemic, with cases across the country rising at alarming rates in recent weeks. Public health experts look at a few markers to determine how bad things are in each state: the number of daily new cases; the infection rate, which can show how likely the virus is to spread; and the percentage of tests that come back positive, which should be low in a state with sufficient testing. A Vox analysis indicates the vast majority of states report alarming trends across all three benchmarks for coronavirus outbreaks. Most states still report a high — sometimes very high — number of daily new Covid-19 cases. Most still have high infection rates. And most have test positive rates that are too high, indicating they don’t have enough tests to track and contain the scope of their outbreaks. (The US overall has seen a plateau in new cases in recent days, but at a level much too high.) Across these benchmarks, only three states — Maine, New York, and Vermont — fare well on all three, meaning their epidemics are relatively under control for now.