The Impossible Task of Modeling United States
Always carry doubt when looking at numbers.
For many valid reasons, models, summary statistics, and visualizations that attempt to summarize United States as a general population often pop up. This is very helpful, humans are not all that good at holding multiple pieces of information, and having things that generalize the overall population are incredibly useful reference points - something any statistician is already aware of. However, I'd argue that these summaries are rarely be dependable. The reason for this stems from one important statistical assumption -i.i.d. or independent and identically distributed- and the structure of the United States government that all but violates this assumption. This is easily seen with the advent of coronavirus pandemic.
As any responsible American and some well-read foreigner would know, United States of America is composed of 50 states (plus more if you count DC, a federal district, and other territories, the American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands). All these states have a separate governing body that imposes regulations on top of the federal government. As is a long-winded way of saying that considering Arkansas and Maine to be the same is kind of like saying that Italy and France are the same.
This is especially true when we look at the progress of COVID-19 and how it impacted different states. Take this very neat visualation by the CDC and reported cases by state.
It neatly tries to capture how severe the pandamic is in each state. However, don't panic if you are living in a state indicated with the scary dark blue color -it doesn't capture the population per state. Meaning any state with a high enough body count is going to have that much more cases. Your doubts shouldn't stop there, either. The validity of the data concerning the state's testing and reporting of cases should also be a concern. Not to mention individuals who won't notice the symptoms or just simply decide to ride it out.
(This is an unfinished, unrefined, test article)