By Allison Bell | September 22, 2020 at 02:55 PM
This CDC map shows
what's happening with new cases of COVID-19 and similar illnesses, like
influenza, out in the community. It's mostly a deep, healthy green. But...
...this CDC chart shows
that the percentage of all U.S. deaths caused by COVID-19, influenza and
similar illnesses is still above the epidemic threshold.
But the percentage of hospital beds occupied by
patients with COVID-19 seems to be much lower, according to HHS data, than it
was...
...in July, when HHS
officials were reporting that patients with COVID-19 were filling 25% or more
of hospital beds throughout the South, and more than 5% of hospital beds in
most of the rest of the country.
The latest COVID-19 testing, hospitalization and death figures
suggest that the summer wave of COVID-19 has ended, and that communities
with successful contagion-control efforts may still have a chance to prevent a
fall wave.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and
its parent, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), continue to
face allegations that political interference has skewed government COVID-19 tracking data.
CDC death count numbers now seem to be taking about six
weeks to become complete. The national death count numbers from six weeks ago,
for the week ending Aug. 15, show that the total number of deaths for that week
as 16% higher than expected.
The United States has been averaging about 2.7 million deaths
per year. If mortality stayed 16% higher than expected for an entire 12-month
period, that would imply that the United States could end up with about 450,000
extra deaths due to COVID-19, COVID-19-related conditions, and the effects of
COVID-19 on care for other health care conditions.
Resources
·
The
Dynata COVID-19 symptom maps and charts are available here.
·
The
COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic is available here.
·
The
CDC’s weekly COVID-19 report is available here.
·
The
HHS hospital capacity data is available here.
·
An
overview article about the COVID-19 data for the previous week is available here.
The CDC uses the percentage of all reported deaths resulting
from COVID-19, influenza, pneumonia, and other COVID-19-like illnesses as an
early indicator of pandemic severity. The percentage for the week ending Sept.
12 — which is subject to big revisions as more state death numbers come in
— was 8.3%, which is well above the epidemic threshold number of 6.3% for
the week.
One question has been whether the start of the school year will
lead to a big surge in COVID-19 cases, as students return to K-12 schools,
colleges and universities.
Some U.S. life insurers said when they reported
second-quarter earnings that the number of COVID-19 deaths had been greater
than or equal to what they had projected, but that the impact on claims had
been much lower, because a high percentage of the deaths had affected older
people living in nursing homes, who were relatively less likely than other U.S.
adults to have large amounts of life insurance still in force.
In theory, a large COVID-19 outbreak in schools could change
that math, by leading to students bringing the virus that causes COVID-19 home
to their parents. Even if the COVID-19 death rate for patients under 65 is
relatively low, an outbreak wave that led to a very large number of infections
among adults ages 18 to 65 could cause a large number of deaths among
people with life insurance.
Most colleges and universities that post daily COVID-19 test
results on online dashboards appear to be getting COVID-19 under control,
according to a sampling of dashboards reviewed by ThinkAdvisor.
But one of those universities had enough cases to cancel
in-person classes for two weeks.
Only a small percentage of schools post daily test data, and
it’s possible that the campuses with weaker test data reporting programs also
have weaker COVID-19 control efforts.
The Dynata Data
Dynata, a data collection and analysis firm, collects
huge volumes of information about COVID-19- like symptoms by giving website
visitors short surveys.
Dynata posts a free, public — but copyrighted — web tool
that can filter the symptoms data.
The percentage of Dynata survey participants ages 18 to 24 who
said they had a dry cough with loss of the sense of smell or taste was 3.1%
3.2% for the two-week period ending Sept. 18, That’s down from 3.1% for the
two-week period ending Aug. 30, as many college students with in-person classes
started heading to campus.
The number of states where 3.5% or more of the college-age
Dynata survey takers said they had COVID-19-like symptoms fell to five,
from six for the two-week period ending Aug. 30.
College-age survey taker symptom rates were highest in Arkansas
and South Dakota.
The positivity rate for college-age survey takers increased to
8.4% for the two-week period ending Sept. 18 for Arkansas, from 2.1% for the
two-week period ending Sept. 11, and to 14.1%, from 5.3%, for South Dakota.
The ThinkAdvisor Campus COVID-19 Dashboard
Tracker
Some colleges and universities have created their own COVID-19
test results reporting web pages, or dashboards.
We looked for ones that provided one-day test counts and
positive results counts for Sept. 18, or, in some cases, Sept. 17, and put the
test counts and positive results counts in a table.
Some campus report separate totals for general “surveillance
testing” and for testing of people who went to campus clinics with COVID-19
symptoms. When both types of data were available, we added the test numbers and
positive report numbers together, to create a single set of numbers for that
campus.
We increased the number of dashboards in our table to 17 this
week, from seven last week. The table for last week included one-day data for
Sept. 11.
For the seven colleges and universities that were in the table
both weeks, the total number of tests reported increased to 7,697, from
5,669. The number of samples found to show signs of COVID-19 fell to 191, from
307.
The percentage of test samples found to show signs of COVID-19
fell to 2.5% for the Sept. 18 test data, from 5.4% for the Sept. 11 test data.
The median positive percentage fell to 0.6%, from 7%.
The three schools that had positive percentages over 5% on Sept.
18 were Michigan Technological University, with a 5.2% positivity rate; the
University of Colorado, with a 10.2% positivity rate; and the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln, with a small number of tests but a 12.6% positivity rate.
The positivity rate at the University of Colorado was up from
8.7% a week earlier. The university responded to its test results by shutting
in-person classes down for two weeks.
The University of Nebraska hasn’t reported plans to close.
Although a high percentage of the people it’s testing have COVID-19, the actual
number of positive test results is low, and its positivity percentage is down
from 16.3% a week earlier.
But the Lincoln Journal-Star is reporting that Bryan Hospital, a
hospital in Lincoln, has seen the number of patients with COVID-19 increase to 31 today, from 18 Friday, and that the
number of patients in the intensive care unit has also increased sharply.
One weakness in our tracking table is that, generally, only
the largest universities post testing dashboards, and many fail to provide
daily data.
Another weakness is that news reports suggest that campus
COVID-19 cases may be surging in the Upper Midwest. The number of universities
in the Upper Midwest that post daily testing data on public dashboards appears
to be low.
|
U.S. University COVID-19 Case Tracker (Results for Sept.
18) |
||||
|
School |
Location |
Tests |
Positive |
% Positive |
|
Arizona, University
of |
Tucson, Arizona |
1,299 |
79 |
6.1% |
|
California at
Berkeley, University of |
Berkeley, California |
926 |
2 |
0.2% |
|
Colorado, University
of |
Boulder, Colorado |
1,392 |
142 |
10.2% |
|
George Washington
University |
District of Columbia |
458 |
0 |
0.0% |
|
Illinois, University
of |
Urbana-Champaign |
10,564 |
27 |
0.3% |
|
Lasell University |
Newton, Massachusetts |
441 |
0 |
0.0% |
|
Massachusetts
Institute of Technology |
Cambridge,
Massachusetts |
3,088 |
2 |
0.1% |
|
Miami, University of |
Coral Gables, Florida |
683 |
5 |
0.7% |
|
Michigan
Technological University |
Houghton, Michigan |
96 |
5 |
5.2% |
|
Nebraska-Lincoln,
University of |
Lincoln, Nebraska |
111 |
14 |
12.6% |
|
Ohio State University |
Columbus, Ohio |
2,953 |
66 |
2.2% |
|
Rhode Island School
of Design |
Providence, Rhode
Island |
31 |
0 |
0.0% |
|
Rice University |
Houston |
900 |
2 |
0.2% |
|
State University of
New York system |
Various |
2,233 |
14 |
0.6% |
|
Tulane University |
New Orleans |
1,738 |
20 |
1.2% |
|
Wisconsin, University
of |
Madison, Wisconsin |
1,545 |
75 |
4.9% |
|
Yale University |
New Haven,
Connecticut |
1,907 |
0 |
0.0% |
|
TOTAL |
|
30,365 |
453 |
1.5% |
No comments:
Post a Comment