The Columbia County Department of Health has released its numbers for today. Since Friday, there have been 12 new cases of COVID-19. The number of active cases being reported today is 5 more than on Friday, from which it can be inferred that, since Friday, 7 county residents have recovered from the virus. The number of county residents hospitalized with COVID-19 is the same as it was on Friday, but today 1 more of those hospitalized is in the ICU. There has not been a death from COVID-19 reported in Columbia County since Thursday, March 3.
A year ago today was a Sunday, and the CCDOH did not report COVID numbers. On the previous Friday, March 5, the CCDOH reported 13 new cases of COVID-19. The total number of cases was 3,600, and the number of active cases was 73. There were 181 county residents in mandatory quarantine, 10 were hospitalized, and 3 were in the ICU. The total number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 at this time last year was 88.
It seems likely that currently, the reported number of daily cases understates the actual daily case number to a much greater degree than it has in the past. I created a graph that compares the 7-day average of hospitalizations with the 7-day average of new cases, offset by several days to account for the lag between identification of infection and hospitalization. For most of the fall and winter, the ratio was about 1:3, meaning that there would be about 10 hospitalizations when cases had been reported at about 30 per day a week or so earlier. Recently, that ratio increased to about 2:1 and was rising. Given that vaccines have been in full effect for many months, I know of no reason why the ratio of hospitalizations to cases should rise dramatically. Indeed, if omicron is milder than previous strains, the ratio of hospitalizations to cases should be lower, if anything. Based on the relationship between cases and hospitalizations that was established over the last several months and 11 people currently hospitalized, it seems that the number of daily new cases a week or so ago would have been about 3 times that--more in the range of 30 to 35 per day, not fewer than 10. A likely explanation is simply that with home testing now widely available, most positive cases are being diagnosed at home and not reported. No doubt the spread of Covid has dropped off sharply from its peaks in January, but probably not nearly as much as the published numbers indicate.
ReplyDeleteThis assessment makes sense scientifically as well as from a common sense point of view. If the number of tests administered was made public, I suspect those numbers would be down in a statistically significant amount over the last few months as almost everyone has access to home tests at this point.
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