COVID-19: This County Is America’s Hotspot

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 22, 12:38PM EST · Published Jan 21, 8:04AM EST

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COVID-19: This County Is America’s Hotspot — © DenisTangneyJr / iStock via Getty Images

The spread of COVID-19 has raced at an accelerating speed across America. Its 24,433,486 confirmed cases are about a quarter of the world’s 96,906,712 total. American deaths have hit 404,812, which is nearly 20% of the world’s 2,075,902. Yet, the United States has only slightly more than 4% of the world’s population.

Hospitals in many cities have intensive care unit beds that are nearly full or have reached total capacity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the American death total will hit 500,000 by mid-February. In the shadow of the spread, many places have run low on vaccine doses, and production and distribution remain slow.

While the disease has spread across most of America, its effects remain uneven. In some situations, the yardstick for this is total deaths and cases. Another measure is cases and deaths per 100,000, which allows for direct comparison from county to county and state to state.

America’s COVID-19 hotspots are defined as counties with the highest number of recent cases among the population. Based on this, Webb County, Texas, is the worst hotspot in the country. Cases per 100,000 over the past seven days number 361, well ahead of the next county, Montour, Pennsylvania, where the number is 321.
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Webb County is north and west of Laredo, the county seat, along the Mexican border. It is also southwest of San Antonio.

The U.S. Census puts Webb County’s population at 276,652, up 10% in a decade, spread across 3,375 square miles. It is sparsely populated by some measures. Detroit, a city of almost 700,000, covers 149 square miles.

Over 95% of Webb County’s population is Hispanic. The county is extremely poor compared to the United States, based on most demographic measures. The median value of an owner-occupied home is $125,900. That is less than half the national figure. The median household income is $46,475, less than two-thirds of the nationwide number. The poverty rate, at 20.9%, is about double the national rate.

COVID-19 has hit the poor and non-white population particularly hard across the nation.

Webb County will come off the list of COVID-10 hotspots sometime in the next several weeks. No county holds the top spot indefinitely. In the meantime, the devastation there has to be unimaginable.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.