What Portion of Your State’s Population Lives in Large Cities?

As has occurred a few times now, I was doing a little population math related to the coronavirus and thought I’d share. Specifically, as I try to figure out whether it’s conscionable to travel to Indianapolis for a friend’s wedding, I was trying to understand how the coronavirus picture compares between Texas and Indiana, and more specifically, how it compares between Austin and Indianapolis, Ft. Wayne, and small town Indiana, from which the majority of guests will be coming.

There is a difference between the Texan coronavirus situation and the Austin coronavirus situation. The latter is evidently worse than the former. Similarly, the Indianapolis coronavirus situation is presumably worse than that for Hoosiers statewide, if national trends are holding true in that state. For my particular purpose, the goal is to estimate how different Austin’s situation is from that of Texas, and how different Indianapolis’s situation is from that of Indiana, in an effort to more directly compare the two.

Generally, we’re seeing that cities are being hit harder by the coronavirus than smaller towns. A lot of this is chalked up to population density, which makes sense, but I’d venture that things like travel in and out, prevalence of outdoor and distant activities, and sheer quantity of interpersonal contact points contribute too, making population density perhaps not the end-all-be-all. Austin isn’t particularly dense, but even in going to a grocery store, I’d guess you’re crossing paths with a larger number of possible carriers than you might in a smaller, denser town, especially if that town is more self-contained. As I often state in these posts, I’m not an epidemiologist, but these are the thoughts leading me to think that while my hometown of Crystal Lake, Illinois has a population density slightly higher than that of Memphis, it’s easier to avoid the virus in the former than the latter after adjusting for statewide infection rates.

With all this in mind, I pulled in the (very basic) data from the Census Bureau and calculated out what percent of each state’s population lives in cities with populations greater than 100,000. The data is below. Its application? My assumption, which may be misguided, is that the larger the share of a state’s population contributed by cities, the closer the coronavirus situation in those cities to that of the state as a whole, and vice versa. In other words, while the situation is better in Indiana than Texas at the moment, Indianapolis and Ft. Wayne may be closer to Austin than is immediately clear, because the city portion of Texas’s population is larger than that for Indiana (emphasis on “may be”—again, this is rather uneducated conjecture, and something to research further before making decisions based on it).