My small town has gone from 7 cases of C19 to 37 in about 8 days. I may have those numbers wrong, and I can't trace the days back to get an accurate count. This follows an expected pattern of adjoining the state's largest city and sister suburb which has a lot of people going to Mass for high-tech firms, plus one of the state's original cases who had been at the notorious Biogen conference.
I don't know what that means, if that is more or less than would be expected for good news/bad news. It's just one place, it just happens to be mine, so I am interested. We had some positive tests at the hospital, at least two close to me, though the isolation and response was extreme so I'm not much worried. I admit it is good to not be there next week.
7 comments:
Testing is bound to increase cases. How could it not? The numbers I'm tracking are deaths. So far it's 4 for my county. That number hasn't changed since early April, though the number of positive tests has increased exponentially. While Alabama has not been a leader in testing, the county I live in has.
"which has a lot of people going to Mass"
I read this a little differently at first.
That's not quite right, you had about 20 cases 1.5 weeks ago. I know because I've been tracking deaths in my town vs cases in yours. My parents have been asking me to come visit and on 5/8 we had 27 deaths in my town vs 20 cases in yours and I said we still couldn't justify it.
@Donna B - not sure if you're using this already, but this site is great to track both cases and deaths by county over time:
https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-by-your-locations/
It saves any counties you enter as well so you can keep checking back easily and compare to other areas where people you love live.
AVIs county has seen a 22% increase in cases and 35% increase in deaths in the past week, so there is reason for concern. It's got a disproportionate number of people I love living there, so I'm fretting a bit, though they had a low starting number.
AVI - mea culpa on my correction. I just realized the Wayback Machine might be scraping this data, and they are. I had grabbed my stat from the cumulative cases and you were looking at active cases. If you ever want to go back and look, you can see what the state website said on a particular day here:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.nh.gov/covid19/
No, it's fine on both counts. I could well have lost track and underestimated the old number, and as Donna reminds, # cases is a function of testing. We have the county nursing home here, so if there was a positive in any of the staff they would have ramped up testing. My hospital still has no patients positive but three staff, so they were offering testing a lot this week.
@bs king - thank you for the link. Most of my people are OK, but I'm not planning on visiting my Colorado relatives anytime soon. Now I'm wondering if anyone is mapping cases by Interstate highways in rural counties. My impression is that "off the beaten path" is a very good thing, as a few of the places I checked are low population and rural, but have an Interstate or are located where two major highways intersect. Their rates are higher than I expected. One county with a population of 60,000 is adjacent to a county with a town of 80,000 and 10 miles from a city of 190,000. It has more cases and deaths than the town of 80,000. It is dissected by Interstate 20.
That my county has so few deaths and cases is somewhat surprising to me --relatively large population (though not densely housed), industry that generates substantial foreign and domestic travel, a major interstate highway, two other major highways, university etc. One factor that is surely helping is the significant number of jobs that easily transitioned to working from home.
Now that AVI has mentioned it, another thing probably helping in my county is that there not very many nursing homes here. Nor are there any nursing homes or meat-packing plants.
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