Weekly COVID-19 Round-up - 3/5/21
River City Data No. 20
This is a big week for us here in Missouri. A year ago, on March 8th, we received official acknowledgment of the first known case of COVID-19 in MO. That morning, before the announcement of the case, was the moment where my family started to prepare for real disruption. I recently re-capped that morning and the week that followed on Twitter. There will no doubt be many retrospective pieces in the media over the next couple of weeks, and I’ll be sharing some reflections here as well.
Tonight, however, I’ll be providing my usual breakdown of cases and trends here in Missouri, as well as an update on vaccination progress. I also go “into the weeds” on the effectiveness of interventions like mask mandates and closing in-person dining as well as unemployment trends. Finally, my interview tonight is with events and marketing professional Diana Cannon. We touch on how COVID has affected the hospitality industry, and how her industry could also help us fight COVID. - Chris
COVID-19 by the Numbers
Total cases in MO: 519,108 (+2,679 from last Friday)
7-day average of new cases per day in MO: 471.43 (-122.43 from last Friday)
Counties with the highest per capita rates (per 1,000) of new cases per day this past week:
Cedar (35.87 per 100,000), Schuyler (31.73), Butler (24.4), St. Clair (16.75), Clay (16.54), Lafayette (16.22), Pettis (15.17), and Christian (15.09)
Total deaths in MO: 8,571 (+200 from last Friday)
7-day average of new deaths per day in MO: 30.86 (-2.14 from last Friday)
These numbers are current as of Thursday, March 4th. Additional statistics, maps, and plots are available on my COVID-19 tracking site.
Summary for the Week Ending March 5th
After weeks of declines, we are starting to see a new pattern at the county-level in Missouri. In many counties, there are still decreases day-over-day and week-over-week. However, in a small but notable number of counties, we see increases in the 7-day average of new cases. Cedar, Schuyler, and St. Clair are three notable counties that fit this pattern.
Butler County, which also has one of the highest rates of new cases in the state, has a different trajectory. There, the number of cases never declined as much as it did in surrounding counties. Its position near the top of the list right now reflects a steady accumulation of new cases rather than a pronounced increase.
Rates in our major metropolitan areas are showing marked improvement. In Kansas City, for example, counties in Kansas that had high rates of infections, like Johnson and Wyandotte counties, have dropped well below their prior levels. The same is true for Missouri counties around Kansas City, which have generally had lower rates of new cases than their neighbors in Kansas.
In St. Louis, the story is similar. Rates are receding everywhere across the metro. However, they have dropped notably in Metro East, where they had remained persistently higher.
We can see these improving rates of new cases in our hospitalization data, which are showing significant improvements - in-patient numbers are the lowest they have been since last summer.
The fact that both metros see lower rates in the Missouri counties than in Kansas and Illinois does give me pause. This may be an area where these differences are partially artifact from the lack of antigen case reporting. I suspect that this does not fully explain the difference. Still, I was eagerly awaiting an update to Missouri’s dashboard today that had been reported to include county-level antigen test results. That update did not materialize, however.
Those data are one of three metrics I am awaiting, along with probable deaths and single-dose vaccine data as the Johnson and Johnson vaccine begins to be administered across Missouri. All will present challenges for my data visualizations, though it’s not clear when any will actually begin to be reported by DHSS.
Vaccination Update
The vaccine data we have do not show any major changes this week. There are still serious geographic disparities in where we are seeing people get vaccines at the highest rates. Mid-Missouri, parts of Northern Missouri (both in the Northeast and the Northwest), and around Cape Girardeau remain the areas with the highest per capita rates of folks receiving at least one vaccine dose.
Vaccines are being distributed by Highway Patrol Districts. I remain concerned that the rates for some districts are well below the rates for others. These include the rates in the heart of the Ozark Mountains (Districts G and I) as well as around St. Louis (District C) and Kansas City (District A).
One consequence of the unequal distribution of vaccines in Missouri is that there are severe inequities by race (a pattern found across the United States). African Americans, in particular, who have been the hardest hit both in terms of illness and death from COVID-19, are being vaccinated at far lower rates than most other communities in Missouri.
The good news in addressing some of these geographic and racial disparities is that Missouri is finally shifting resources into the St. Louis and Kansas City metro areas. These two regions have had very high demand but low supply, even as other regions in the state have clinics where doses go unused and, in rare cases, have to be discarded.
Into the Weeds
One feature of the job losses early in the pandemic was their gendered nature - women lost jobs or left them at far greater rates than men did. However, a new report from the New York Times “Upshot” blog shows that those losses have largely disappeared. As we cross the one-year mark in many states, men and women nationally are now unemployed at similar rates.
On a related note, I want to share a new paper in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. This provides new support for the link between mask mandates, limits to in-person dining, and a decrease in cases. I see this as connected to unemployment discussed above since limiting in-person dining has clear connections to employment patterns.
Taken together, I see these two articles as underscoring the need for social policies that give us the ability to make the hard decisions, like closing in-person dining, without leaving working people behind to deal with the consequences of those needed interventions on their own. I think it is also worth underscoring that the hospitality industry generally has been one of the hardest-hit sectors of the economy.
Weekly Interview
Diana Cannon is an events, project management, and marketing professional who has lived and worked in 8 major cities all over the world. Her passions for travel and gatherings have been impeded by covid, but she hopes to get back to them soon.
CP: Before we get to COVID, can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
DC: This is my 3rd time living in St. Louis despite not being from here. I call it Round 3 – Round 1 was 2001-2005, and Round 2 was 2015-2017. In between, I’ve had stints in other cities (Chicago, New Orleans) and in other countries/territories (Qatar, Spain, Puerto Rico). While I have worked for several different entities: hotels, marketing firms, consultants – my work has always been focused on hospitality.
I moved back to St. Louis this time in March 2019 with the intention of opening a bar focused on classic cocktails and small bites called choirgirl. I had a space I’d fallen in love with in the Delmar Loop and it fell through due to the developer wanting a significant backer, to the tune of $2M, which I did not have. (N.B. the space remains vacant!) I realize now it was a stroke of luck because if I had signed on the space I would have taken on a significant amount of debt only to open a few weeks before the pandemic hit the U.S.
CP: Can you share how COVID has affected and is changing the hospitality industry in the U.S. - where are things at, and where do you see things going?
DC: The way small business owners, particularly in the hospitality industry, have had to act nimbly and had to pivot to entirely new business models with very little support or guidance from local, state, and federal leadership has been at once inspiring and infuriating to watch. No one should have been left to “figure it out” to this extent and we’re fortunate that we haven’t lost more hospitality establishments than we have. I think any owner would tell you that it is still a constant struggle and the act of saving their businesses from the brink is a daily one.
CP: I know you’ve spent a lot of time traveling internationally (and I’m very jealous!). Can you put an international spin on the previous question?
DC: Mostly it has been frustrating to watch the U.S. response vs other countries which also had resurgences and “second waves” but not nearly to the extent we did here. I frequently think we didn’t have a second wave because we never took care of the first. I have friends and family in Spain, Peru, and Israel who I speak with regularly and their experience has been so different from ours. Specifically, with Israel, we now see they have vaccinated a large portion of their population, so their vaccine distribution has been less fraught with delays than ours has.
CP: I saw your tweet that we need to get more event planners involved in distributing vaccines for COVID and I’m fascinated - can you tell me more about how you think this could help us reach people who need to be vaccinated?
DC: So many of the tools we need to manage the appointment and crowd organization portion of vaccine distribution already exist. If you’ve ever registered for a large conference with breakout sessions, you know you have to register and provide certain details, and sometimes you’ll be waitlisted for certain sessions if they’re popular – all of that could translate to vaccine distribution. It’s difficult to watch vaccines get given to folks who are “in the right place at the right time,” like at a bar at Union Station or in a Walgreens picking up a random grocery item because there are methods and tools to do this in an organized way and they’re just not being used for the most part.
CP: Finally, what is giving you hope right now in terms of where we are at with COVID?
DC: The new administration and new leadership in Washington give me hope – not that we will now get everything right, but that there are people in place who are vested in doing the right and not trying to constantly minimize the seriousness and the urgency of the response. 522,000 Americans have now died of this terrible virus. We owe it to them and to ourselves to salvage what we can and climb out of the darkness we’ve experienced over the last year.
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