What Are We Emphasizing?

On Friday I blogged about curious aspects of COVID-19 numbers are local City and County updates provide. Primarily, the issue that the number of reported cases is not the same as the number of new cases or even current, active cases where a person still has the Coronavirus and could be contagious. What is emphasized in the reporting are the number of reported new cases – many of which appear to be from weeks ago because the person is no longer considered infectious.

Here’s a Monday update, with two things to note.

First, in Monday’s e-mail, there was a new explanatory note included defining active cases – a number always reported but never emphasized – as cases that are still infectious. Frankly this is the number we need to be emphasizing. Highlighting large numbers of potentially positive test results that are no longer infectious only confuses the issue, keeps people fearful, and muddies the waters in terms of what is the current risk. This is what most people (rightfully) care about – what is my current risk of contracting COVID-19 based on the number of known infected people in my area.

Between the weekend (183 new reported cases) and Monday (77 new reported cases) there were 260 new reported cases. However the number of active cases – where people are considered to still have the Coronavirus active in their systems and therefore are potentially infectious to others – decreased from 361 on Thursday/Friday to 308. That’s a 14% drop rate in current infections! You’d think that would be cause for celebration but you certainly don’t hear this statistic touted in news articles.

The only local news article reported how the number of cases and hospitalizations have increased while the number of deaths and hospitalizations requiring intensive care unit care have declined. In other words, the impression is given there are more people who are sick or getting sick, but they are not as severely affected. Since they don’t provide us with a level of detail that includes when the various reported cases were actually tested, all we can conclude reasonably is that more people were sick than we realized, but that wasn’t really too big a deal because the vast majority of them got better without requiring hospitalization. Again, demonstrating that the Coronavirus – while still a risk to the elderly and those with underlying health issues – is by and large not nearly as lethal as we initially thought back in the spring.

Don’t just read the numbers, think about them and draw your own conclusions. I’d be interested to know what the data says to you.