William Frey tracks how high-prevalence counties have expanded on a weekly basis since the end of March, focusing on key geographic and demographic attributes as well as their 2016 voting patterns.
www.brookings.edu
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s more parts of America proclaim themselves
open for business, COVID-19 continues to expand into new counties and states in many areas with demographic and political orientations favorable to President Donald Trump. This is especially noteworthy given that the president has
pushed for an even faster reopening of the U.S. economy.
Now, for four weeks running, counties newly designated with a high prevalence of COVID-19 cases were more likely to have voted for Trump than for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, according to our analyses. In the latest week of this monitor, such counties favored Trump by a 12% margin in 2016, and, as in recent weeks, they are also much less urban and less racially diverse than places where the coronavirus was most prevalent in March and early April.
This tracking represents our seventh week of monitoring counties that newly qualify as reaching high COVID-19 prevalence (at least 100 cases per 100,000 population based on case data reported by
The New York Times and 2019 population data reported by the
U.S. Census Bureau). In the most recent week, May 11 to May 17, 176 new counties identified as high-prevalence counties. In the seven weeks between March 29 and May 17, the share of the U.S. population residing in such counties rose from 8% to 79%.