Weekly COVID-19 Round-up - 3/25/21
River City Data No. 23
My update tonight includes the latest data on infections and vaccinations. We are seeing the pace of vaccinations pick up, especially in St. Louis and Kansas City, but much work remains to be done - only 13% of Missourians have completed vaccination. I also have the privilege of sharing my interview with fellow Missouri COVID data wrangler Matthew Holloway, who has collected data directly on a daily basis from local health departments since March. Matthew is also a finalist for a Data Hero award because of his work. - Chris
COVID-19 by the Numbers
Total cases in MO: 580,405 (+2,690 from last Thursday)
7-day average of new cases per day in MO: 577.43 (+11.14 from last Thursday)
Counties with the highest per capita rates (per 1,000) of new cases per day this past week:
Shelby (63.64 per 100,000), McDonald (44.43), Mississippi (24.94), Macon (24.35), Carter (23.05), and Atchison (21.69)
Total deaths in MO: 8,892 (+79 from last Thursday)
7-day average of new deaths per day in MO: 12.29 (+3.57 from last Thursday)
Percent of people initiating vaccination: 23% (+2% from last Thursday)
Percent of people completing vaccination: 13% (+2% from last Thursday)
Case and mortality numbers are current as of Wednesday, March 24th. Vaccination numbers are current as of Thursday, March 25th. Additional statistics, maps, and plots are available on my COVID-19 tracking site.
New on the Tracking Site
My tracking site now contains several new and updated data sources:
Hospitalizations by metropolitan areas,
and regions.
The vaccinations page also has a new, interactive reference map of Missouri State Highway Patrol Districts to help folks understand what counties these areas cover.
Illness Trends in the Past Week
The top-level trend in Missouri right now is that our rate of new cases has stabilized over the past week - we saw significant drops over February and then a slight jump in new cases when antigen tests were factored just over two weeks ago. Since then, however, rates have been pretty flat and comparable to the states surrounding us that I track trends for.
This stabilization belies a key trend, however. We are seeing varying spikes in new cases in rural counties in both Northern and Southern Missouri. Right now, these increases are happening in a handful of counties (see above for a list):
Shelby County has the highest rate of new cases in Missouri right now:
Notice that Lewis County has a sharp upward trend as well - this may be the next rural county to see a sharp increase. The good news is that, at least until now, these upticks in new cases recede quickly. Last week, Montgomery County was the county with the largest jump, and Gasconade County also had a notable increase:
Notice how quickly both counties’ rates came back down, however. This pattern has played out fairly consistently over the past ten days. I am not sure what is causing these spikes, but they have been confined almost exclusively to rural counties.
For now, hospitalizations in St. Louis remain well below their highs, as do patterns in reported mortality, where the numbers being reported weekly have declined quite a bit.
Vaccination Trends in the Past Week
I have some guarded optimism about vaccinations this week. As the state has begun putting a larger emphasis on the Kansas City and St. Louis metropolitan areas, we have seen counties in both regions receive some of the highest 7-day vaccination rates in Missouri.
This same pattern is driving the rates by Missouri State Highway Patrol Districts to shift as well, with Districts A (Kansas City) and C (St. Louis) receiving the highest rates of new vaccinations over the last week.
However, we have a long way to go. These two districts still have relatively modest rates of completed vaccines. The rollout remains rocky, as I learned today when I attended the mass vaccination event in St. Louis City. Racial disparities also remain significant, though the rate of vaccination for African Americans has closed just a bit on the rate for white people.
Moreover, vaccination rates in Regions I and G, which stretch from the I-44 corridor around Rolla south to the Arkansas border, continue to have the lowest rates of vaccination in Missouri. While I am placing emphasis on getting St. Louis and Kansas City caught-up, we cannot forget that some rural parts of the state are also lagging behind in vaccination progress as well.
Weekly Interview
Matthew Holloway is a lifelong Missourian, born and raised near Neosho. He attended Northwest Missouri State and is a Human Resource professional, having worked both in health care settings for Rebuild Joplin, which was an effort to help individuals displaced by the May 2011 EF-5 tornado. Matthew has been posting nighly data updates on Facebook and is a finalist for a Data Hero award (vote here) because of his work. He lives in Joplin with his wife, two children (Hampton, 3, and Ellie, 9 months), and two dogs.
CP: Take me back to March 2020 - what inspired you to start making maps of COVID cases in Missouri?
MH: I’m not sure if you or anyone actually recalls this (Editor’s note: I do!), but the ten-day period following the announcement of the first COVID-19 case being identified in Missouri, the DHSS website had a small excel table with two columns, one for a county name and one for the number of cases they had confirmed. I had been following the pandemic abroad for about two months leading into the first Missouri case, and one of the ways I was able to really understand the spread of the virus was through some exceptional data visualization projects. Candidly, I get so envious when I see an exceptional visualization, and I explicitly recall thinking, “Hey, this could be my chance to get into data visualization and maybe make a career change.”
I believe the first death was announced back on March 18th, and in the two days following, since we still didn’t have any kind of good visual product, I decided I would throw something together just to see what it looked like. I made my first visual the next day and shared my first one publicly on the day after on Twitter. It still has exactly zero likes or retweets. A few nights later, I showed it to my wife, who suggested that I post it on Facebook. I really don’t like Facebook, but I did it anyway. In the first several days, I started engaging with some old friends who I hadn’t heard from in years, and they encouraged me to continue providing it.
CP: I’m curious what your process is like - can you share a bit about the work that goes into your data collection?
MH: For the first probably 45 days, I created really long search queries to try and pick up on literally every published post or page from the last 24 hours that had to do with the virus in Missouri. I would go through and read every single one of those, adding data into my spreadsheet as I went along.
Around the beginning of May, something really interesting started happening. In one day alone, I had four health department administrators reach out to me through either Facebook or e-mail. The following day, four more. The day after that, probably ten more. They were reaching out to me because they all had concerns with the number of cases being reported through the DHSS’ website. These administrators all had the same thing in mind - they all had a genuine desire for the most accurate data available to be made public. So they began connecting with me and sending me new case numbers every single day. Also, I have this incredible group of followers who were all kind of invested in understanding the data. They ended up crowdsourcing the majority of this project in mid-summer. So, each night I would read through Facebook comments on the previous night’s posts to collect case data that I missed.
Ultimately, I got to a place where I had a way to check about 110 of the 117 jurisdictions in the state of Missouri every single day. This meant refreshing about 65 web pages and sorting through hundreds of messages and comments each night. I had some really great comprehensive case and death data, and a lot of it was coming through in real-time, but the method was definitely not efficient at all. I decided to make a google form and try to streamline the data to the same place. To ensure legitimacy, I asked for screenshots of any case information that was being provided from someone outside of a health department and would look at each of those every night. That became a nightmare, as you can imagine, with hundreds of submissions every single night.
Towards the end of the summer, I decided to let a few people help me collect data each night. Currently, I have five wonderful ladies who log-in every night, check their share of jurisdictions, and enter the data into a shared google sheet. Without their assistance, there is no possible way I would be able to continue this project. It still takes me several hours every night to prepare the narrative and the visuals, but it would be even longer without them. They are as responsible for the sustainability of this project as I am. I will note that I actually still hear directly from about 10 different county health departments, every single night, with any updates on numbers or relevant information they’d like me to share.
CP: That is an incredible amount of work - you’re much braver than I am. I decided early in the pandemic that doing so was beyond the scope of what I could take on personally, but I’m glad you’ve done it! What about your maps, have you been doing that by hand, too?
MH: I use a cloud-based graphic program, and I have to manually update each number of deaths and cases, for every single county that shows a day-to-day change, every single night. It isn’t even something that I can tab through. I have never felt like I was in much of a position to put the project on hold for two weeks so I could self-teach ArcGIS for dummies. It constantly moves forward, and if there are lapses in the data, it makes it significantly more challenging to catch up. Plus, there are a lot of people who expect this data every single day, and I don’t want to disappoint anyone.
CP: Far from disappointing people, you’re a finalist for a Data Hero award this month - congratulations!
MH: Thank you! I consider it to be an incredible honor, and as far as Missouri goes it certainly hits close to home being recognized on the same platform as Dr. Garza who has demonstrated a great deal of advocacy on a public platform, Steve Edwards at Cox who has been among the most transparent hospital administrators in the entire country, and of course yourself who I have followed closely since I found you over the summer. This level of recognition is definitely not something I ever expected.
CP: Can you reflect a bit on the experience of providing these maps?
MH: As far as the experience goes, I have learned a tremendous amount about epidemiology, data visualization, large-scale logistics, public communication. I will have to stop there because that list could become quite lengthy. Since my project’s inception, I have always taken full ownership over a mistake when I make one. When someone had a question about how or where I found something, I provided that information to them myself. If I made a decision, I explained why I made a decision. If the recent election cycle taught us anything, it’s that people are hungry for change, and they want it to come from someone they trust. I did that by being human - taking ownership, being responsive, and practicing transparency.
CP: What’s something that keeps you going with your project?
MH: This was a difficult question for me to answer because I never stop to take time to think about things like this. First, I constantly have people telling me what my work means to them. Most days, I feel like I am largely just regurgitating public data and putting it in a single place on Facebook, but I think oftentimes, some of the stuff that really connects with and engages people are the narratives I provide. I’ve probably received more messages about something I have written than I have about the data I provide. Everyone has experienced loss in some sense over the past year, whether it be an individual, financial stability, relationships, or something tangible, and as a result, everyone has been grieving in some capacity. These are usually pretty heavy stories to be hauling around.
Second, and I kind of hesitate to mention this, back in early summer, after having done nightly updates for like 100 consecutive days, people were hounding me about setting up a donation page. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I had this influx of donations that were largely just kind of labeled as “thanks for everything you’ve done this year.” I come from a poor family, and I chose to work in the not-for-profit field (or it chose me, one of the two). Pretty much at no point in my life have I found myself with money in excess of my bills. But, because there were some exceptionally generous folks out there who had followed my work, after domain, storage, and software costs were taken care of, I was able to give my family the best Christmas we will ever have. And for a few days of us staying home together, watching movies, playing with new toys with each of the kids, and just having that quality family time that I felt we missed out on all year, not worrying about the project or COVID-19 or anything at all. I will never forget that holiday for the rest of my life, and I feel like I am eternally in debt to those folks who helped make that happen.
CP: It sounds like your project has resonated with a lot folks, but its also had a big impact on you. What is giving you hope right now in terms of where we are at with COVID?
MH: For me, I am encouraged to see needs being met in creative ways. One example of that is how early on with our vaccination plan, basically the only way you could get signed up for a shot was by doing it online. Early on, I started challenging my followers to find people who might need assistance navigating some of those websites to get signed up. The first couple of nights, I got some messages and comments saying, “I got my parents/neighbors signed up!” Within a week, I was getting messages from followers who were making a bigger impact, including this one: “A couple of my neighbors and I follow you. We read your post last week and decided to canvas our entire subdivision. We just finished getting over 70 people on lists for vaccines!”. Someone told me about how their kids set up a socially distanced lemonade stand-type thing in their yard and collected information to go home and input into the state’s vaccination registry.
At the surface level, these are beautiful and emotional stories. The one with the little kids still makes my eyes water, just typing about it. But beyond that, so many people have wanted to do something to help for a year now, but they haven’t found an opportunity to do it, because you’re supposed to stay at home. People have said awful things to me, about me, and about my family. But as long as there are folks who have the drive to serve others, I think we will continue to find ways around, over, or through some of these barriers.
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