For all the bashing of Texas and Florida over their past month of rising Covid cases, blamed on their governor’s reluctance to mandate masks or vaccines, remember last year when the summer rise (mid-June through mid-August) was in very large part due to a spike in cases/deaths across the sunnier SOUTHERN STATES that are currently seeing the same rise this summer as well???
Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona, and Southern California (despite CA’s more reactive lockdowns and mandates) all had major summer spikes strong enough to drive the national numbers up (see below).
Fast forward to now and the same summer rise is occurring across the south while the Northern states, to include Northern California, remain stable; their spikes cycled more severely across different seasons, notably early in the pandemic (spring 2020) and throughout their very fatal late fall/early winter surge.
TL;dR – Cable News linking specific state surges to governors they don’t like ignores how 2021’s geographic Covid surges are mirroring 2020’s.

States ranked by new cases recorded Aug 4
