I don’t think it is that unusual for the flu to hit some states before others.
I wonder if flu can be correlated to how sunny or not it is in some states in winter.
There are winters where it has been gray for a month, though maybe not stormy, and other winters where it may have been colder on average temp-wise, but didn’t seem as bad because it was fairly sunny.
One January I had a heck of time on some of my work outings because so many trucks had crashed and tied up traffic due to tremendous sun glare problems.
Yes, you make sense. All I’m really doing is watching the numbers and “wishing them down” anyway.