1. New county-level #risk indicators released by @CDCgov last night.
Here's your look at weekly #transmission levels since Feb 24.
After looking much better in March, we're continuing to see rates of newly reported cases increasing in most US regions.
2. But, as has been the case for a while, when basing risk level on #hospitalization rates and hospital capacity, at least visually, the story is very different.
3. This shows CHANGE in each metric yesterday compared to 1 week prior. Many more places worsening than improving.
14% of the population worsened on the hospital-based measure; only 1% improved.
23% of the population worsened on the transmission-based measure; only 6% improved.
4. Nearly 80% of people live in a county classified as #substantial or #high community transmission, up from 46% 4 weeks prior.
Also, now nearly 1 in 4 people live in a county classified as #medium or #high risk on the hospital-based metric, up from only 3% 4 weeks prior.
5. Here's that same figure (changing risk level over time) by state. This is the #hospital-based measure.
84% of the population in Florida still resides in a county classified as a "low level".
6. And here's that same figure (changing risk level over time) by state. This is the #transmission-based measure.
Northeast speaks for itself, but Florida now has 93% of its population in a substantial or high transmission area over the past week.
When speaking with NPR last week, I said the plateauing of hospitalizations for 3 weeks made me feel like a downturn was coming.
In FL, the data are suggestive of improvements in the # of people being hospitalized w/ COVID.
1/
The state-specific trends in the COVID hospital census since June 1 also suggest we are seeing a recent decrease in FL (dk purple), the US as a whole (black), and a number of states.
Yes, FL still has among the highest rates, but we also have one of the oldest populations.
2/
If we indeed see a prolonged decrease in COVID hospitalization census, many of the largest states, who have been below previous pandemic years, will start their decrease right as they approach (but do not exceed) 2022 rates.
Sorry for the delay everyone, a lot going on personally. But I have modified my dashboard to accommodate the CDC reporting changes.
My site focuses on: 1) Hospitalization-based county risk levels 2) Detailed hosp trends 3) Deaths
with links out for wastewater, variants, vax
1/
The "Risk Indicators" page is similar to the older page, but the data upon which indicators are based has changed. There are no longer "risk levels" and "transmission levels", rather levels based exclusively on "confirmed" COVID hospital admission rates over the prior 7 days.
2/
The "Hospitalizations" page has not changed much. Still starts out with a Florida-centric look and then gives a lot of state- and age-specific census and admission numbers, rates, and rankings.
It's been a while since I've done a #COVID update.
These are national weekly @CDCgov "community levels" based primarily on hospitalization rates.
This past week has been the "best" since April of last year with <1% of the population living in a high-level county.
1/
Of course, this comes with the following caveats according to the CDC, with likely underestimation of levels in Hawaii and Mississippi, and overestimation in several counties in Georgia and Arizona.
2/
Transmission levels are likely to be grossly underreported, but as we look at them over time, are showing modest improvement (LEFT).
This is in agreement with the regional wastewater monitoring data, which also shows improvements over the last 6 weeks (RIGHT).
2/ Below are adult inpatient hospital census rates for each state since May 1, 2022. Only "confirmed" (as opposed to suspected) COVID hospitalizations are included.
The orange and red coloring suggests recent increases over the past week.
3/ But for context, below are the inpatient census stats for adults throughout the pandemic - for most states, we remain well below the worst parts of the pandemic (not that that should be the bar we are trying to avoid).
2/ Clearly, part of our genomic surveillance efforts are to have TIMELY information when more concerning variants are increasing in relative prevalence. In this case, it appears we lost some time (I was wondering why those variants were not yet showing up).
3/ BUT, I don't tend to jump to an accusation of something nefarious.
The beginning of the footnote states that variants circulating <1% are grouped into "other".