Weekly COVID-19 Round-up - 10/14/21
River City Data No. 52
Lots of good news to go around tonight, but I’m worried about the bottoming out of new vaccinations (excluding boosters) throughout the entirety of the state. I am not convinced we have reached vaccination rates that would ensure we avoid yet another spike this fall and winter. Perhaps this is a too sober assessment, but we are now making more progress in giving boosters out than expanding the pool of first-time, newly vaccinated Missourians. Boosters are essential for certain folks, but we have to continue to raise the number of our neighbors who get immunized in the first place. In other words, we still have work to do. - Chris
COVID-19 by the Numbers
Total cases in MO: 854,131 (+8,247 from last Thursday)
7-day average of new cases per day in MO: 1,178.14 (-322.43 from last Thursday)
Counties with the highest per capita rates (per 100,000) of new cases per day this past week:
Scotland (90.42 per 100,000), Bollinger (46.53), Lincoln (44.74), Vernon (37.28), Bates (35.77), Butler (34.43), Lewis (32.77), Perry (32.08), Douglas (30.98), and Jefferson (30.2)
Total deaths in MO: 12,511 (+129 from last Thursday)
7-day average of new deaths per day in MO: 18.43 (-10.57 from last Thursday)
Percent of all Missourians initiating vaccination: at least 49% (no change from last Thursday)
Percent of all Missourians completing vaccination: at least 44% (no change from last Thursday)
Case and mortality numbers are current as of Wednesday, October 13th. Vaccination numbers are current as of Thursday, October 14th. Additional statistics, maps, and plots are available on my COVID-19 tracking site.
Trends in the Past Week
Our top-line numbers continue to improve statewide and regionally. We’re “only” averaging just 1,178 new cases per day over the last week, which is a continuation of the steady improvement we’ve seen over the past couple of weeks. “Outstate” Missouri, which had represented the bulk of new cases early in the Delta wave, is now at the lowest per capita rate of any of the three larger regions for which I calculate new case rates. “Outstate” is clocking a third of the cases they were experiencing on average at their peak in early August.
Only one county is currently experiencing a significant spike in new cases - Scotland County, in the very northeastern part of Missouri along the Iowa border. However, the spike they have is pretty similar in magnitude to other Delta-fueled spikes in that part of the state over the past few months (including Clark, Knox, Lews, Marion, and Ralls counties).
Scotland is also notable because it saw very few new cases between February and mid-September. Its rate has been awkwardly (perhaps suspiciously) flat for months despite steady, if gentle, increases during the spring in other parts of the state.
Beyond the notable drop in new cases (except Scotland County), we’re also experiencing declines across other vital metrics. Hospitalizations have continued to fall across Missouri’s metropolitan areas through the very beginning of October. They are still pretty high around Cape Girardeau, which makes sense given the relatively high rates of new cases (though they’ve fallen) in the Bootheel and southeastern Missouri more generally.
We have up-to-date data for the St. Louis area, where the decline from a third peak in late August has been steady. The in-patient census is now just a bit less than half what it was at that peak, which is good news for weary health care providers. We need it to decline by another 200 patients or so to reach our lowest level of the pandemic, which was in June before Delta took hold here. Still, good news to see the steady decline.
Mortality has also declined, though I suspect the plateau in mid-September may ultimately look larger than it does now. It still takes weeks to get accurate mortality data from DHSS, and so recent trends are often biased downward in a rather extreme fashion (and this is even after I cut off two weeks of the most recent data). Still, we averaged thirty-five deaths per day for much of August and are now only losing something on the order of fifteen to twenty of our neighbors each day. It’s an improvement, and as hospitalizations fall, this measure will drop as well.
We can infer based on what we know about vaccines and the risk of mortality that many of these recent deaths are among Missourians who declined to get vaccinated. I’ll end tonight with the worst data point we have right now - vaccination rates have plummeted to the point where already fully vaccinated folks seeking boosters are outpacing first and second-shot numbers. The rates of new vaccination you see on the legend below are just abysmally low, especially when you consider the top-line fact above that there has been no material change in our initiation or completion rates for vaccinations (excluding boosters).
