But, talk about perfect timing: Kinsa<\/a> has data for much of the US showing when people were, and are<\/b>, running fevers. Their data correlates pretty closely to flu season.<\/p>\n So, come Covid19, they moved fast and created https:\/\/healthweather.us<\/a>. This web page shows in color and graphically which counties in the US have been affected by fevers and when, post February 16th.<\/p>\n The good, the bad, the ugly:<\/p>\n The Good: A couple minutes in the Firefox Web Developer says the data underneath the web page is remarkably clean and accessible. (OK, they’ve made breaking changes to the data a couple times in the last few days, but life is tough. Boo. Hoo.)<\/p>\n The Bad: Starting Feb 16? Why not Nov 1, 2019? I know why. But why?<\/p>\n The Ugly: Sorry, Tuco. You’re written out of this script. It’s a pretty web page.<\/p>\n Can the web page and data reveal outbreaks of fever in near real time? Kinsa<\/a> sure hopes so.<\/p>\n As it turns out, the famously big US Covid19 outbreak (NY city) does show up in Kinsa’s<\/a> data.<\/p>\n But, it remains to be seen what happens over the next few weeks as people wander out of stay-at-home. Thermometers don’t inherently pay attention to political spin, and don’t inherently serve to confuse. So, I’m rooting for Kinsa<\/a>.<\/p>\n Now, this is all very nice, but what does it lead to?<\/p>\n Well, look at the orange\/red line in the NY County image above. Notice its shape – its profile. Call that shape the “fever profile”.<\/p>\n I was clicking around some counties on the web page and noticed an odd thing: Most counties had a fever profile from February to May that looked like neighboring counties. Like, say, county A had a spike of fevers around March 17th, and so did bordering counties B and C. Not counties two states over, though.<\/p>\n Fair enough.<\/p>\n But, sometimes there seemed to be sharp transitions between one county and the next with respect to their curves. Maybe my imagination. Maybe not.<\/p>\n I wanted to see the whole country’s county-time fever profile similarities at a glance. If two counties had a similar fever profile\/curve from February through today, the two counties should look similar in a picture. And if their fever profiles were different, they should look different.<\/p>\n So, I whipped up a program to color counties based on the total fever-percentage-of-people numbers in 3 bands of time. E.g. Feb 16 to the end of February. The first half of March. And the third band for mid-March to the present. Then the larger the totals a county has in fever percentages in each band, the brighter a color is. The first band is red. The second, green. And the last, blue.<\/p>\n And, here is a picture of the US with counties colored based on fever percentage profiles as of today:<\/p>\n It looks like if you really didn’t want a fever, you should have been in a dark area – Arizona, New Mexico, or the Knoxville Tennessee area. That latter area is quite the surprise.<\/p>\n And if you like Covid19, you wanted to be in the bright blue (mid-March and later) Florida or the New York City areas. Don’t forget to be old!<\/p>\n If you want the flu (in red February), go north-central (ND, WI, MN, northern MI, … or … Canada?).<\/p>\n If you do like your body hot, go to where the colors are bright: downstate Illinois, Indiana, western Kentucky, and Missouri. Maybe Ohio. Or maybe California! Though in California a hot body could be taken two ways.<\/p>\n Here is a picture based on the fever percentages minus<\/strong> what Kinsa<\/a> expected<\/strong> them to be given historical trends:<\/p>\n Bright New York is pretty clearly where the unusual fever has been. And I love the West Virginia hole in the picture. Examining the (Fever –<\/b> Expected) profile for a county there:<\/p>\n shows they dodged the flu.<\/p>\n Another bright spot I didn’t expect was downstate Illinois. The bright purple says they probably had a bit more flu and Covid19 than Kinsa<\/a>‘s expectations. Or something.<\/p>\n You want movies? You got ’em:<\/p>\n Percentages of people running a fever stepping “today” from February through May:<\/p>\n![](\"\/alex\/blog\/images\/kinsa_ny_county_2020_05_27.png\")
<\/p>\n![](\"\/alex\/blog\/images\/county_observed_thru_2020_05_25.png\")
<\/p>\n![](\"\/alex\/blog\/images\/county_observed_minus_expected_thru_2020_05_25.png\")
<\/p>\n![](\"\/alex\/blog\/images\/Greenbrier_County_2020_05_25.png\")
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