Weekly COVID-19 Round-up - 6/17/21
River City Data No. 36
This week, we are watching case rates climb in a large portion of Northern and Southwestern Missouri alongside growing hospitalization rates, especially in the Joplin and Springfield areas. This comes as public health officials raise concerns about both the Delta variant and our lagging vaccination rates. - Chris
COVID-19 by the Numbers
Total cases in MO: 623,721 (+4,055 from last Thursday)
7-day average of new cases per day in MO: 579.29 (+84.14 from last Thursday)
Counties with the highest per capita rates (per 100,000) of new cases per day this past week:
Linn (111.37 per 100,000), Worth (98.04), Livingston (60.65), Polk (46.19), Caldwell (37.89), Chariton (37.86), Taney (37.59), and Webster (31.89)
Total deaths in MO: 9,828 (+48 from last Thursday)
7-day average of new deaths per day in MO: 6.86 (-3.14 from last Thursday)
Percent of all Missourians initiating vaccination: at least 39% (+1% point from last Thursday)
Percent of all Missourians completing vaccination: at least 33% (+1% point from last Thursday)
Case and mortality numbers are current as of Wednesday, June 16th. Vaccination numbers are current as of Thursday, June 17th. Additional statistics, maps, and plots are available on my COVID-19 tracking site.
Illness Trends in the Past Week
Over the last week, our statewide and “outstate” seven-day averages have risen daily. Conversely, there has been little increase in case rates in St. Louis and Kansas City. Both St. Louis City and St. Louis County, for example, are quite far down the list of current seven-day per capita averages right now. I continue to worry that people's cognitive response to the current numbers is “but they’re so low.” This is compounded by the “COVID is over” mentality out there. As I’ve written before, the trend below does not look like a severe one relative even to six weeks ago.
Three things are giving me deep concern right now. The first is that the trend above, as tame as it looks, means Missouri is tied for second with Colorado and Utah right now regarding state-level rates of new cases. Given the percentage change values for these states and the current hardest-hit state (Wyoming), Missouri may have the worst seven-day average in the United States by next week.
A corollary of this first concern is that Missouri continues to have some of the hardest-hit counties in the United States. For example, Linn County has the highest seven-day average of any county in the United States. Among counties with more than 10,000 residents, Livingston County ranks fourth nationwide, and Polk County ranks seventh. Worth County would be tied for second on this list, except its population is below 10,000 residents.
My second concern is how widespread increases are right now. The number of counties with over twenty new cases per 100,000 residents per day was less than ten just a few weeks ago. As of yesterday, it has grown more than three-fold to twenty-eight. Counties that meet this criterion cover a wide swath of Northern and Southwestern Missouri.
Perhaps the best news is that the top-line numbers in Northern Missouri have come down, including far down in Putnam County, whose seven-day average has fallen significantly over the past ten days.
I don’t have the space to cover every county that fits into my concerns right now, but you can see them cataloged on a single page of my website. The trends around Springfield represent what we see around Lake of the Ozarks, in parts of the Ozarks themselves, around Joplin, and in parts of Western, Northwestern, and Northeastern Missouri. Over the past two weeks, rates of new cases have pretty uniformly climbed up in counties all across these areas. Again, the growth looks slight if you compare things to November, but from just a few weeks ago until now, counties like Taney have had rates of new cases double, triple, quadruple, or even more.
I do want to point out that Polk County’s rate has been corrected, with big thanks to friend-of-the-newsletter Marie Ceselski, who has been watching their numbers very closely. With her daily updates, it became clear that the New York Times and DHSS were both out of step with the local health department, but that has fortunately been corrected as of today. It shows that there was not a recent downturn in Polk County, as my plots indicated over the past few days. Instead, there has been a generally upward trend over the past month.
Given these trajectories, it is not surprising that rates are climbing more generally in both the Springfield and Joplin metropolitan areas while they are pretty stable in the remaining Missouri metros.
My final concern has to do with those same metro areas. Earlier in the pandemic, hospitalizations were a lagging indicator. In other words, cases would climb first, then the number of hospitalized people would climb afterward. However, based on the data we have so far, hospitalizations have climbed alongside and even ahead of new case numbers.
Given what we know about the growing prevalence of the Delta variant, these rising hospitalization numbers may signal that, even as the number of cases slowly rose, there are proportionally more people getting more seriously sick.
Vaccination Trends in the Past Week
Looking at counties where rates are climbing right now in Southwest Missouri alongside vaccination rates raises an additional set of concerns. There are counties around Joplin and in the Ozarks with less than twenty percent of their total population vaccinated. Even our best counties’ vaccination rates are lower than forty-five percent.
Rates of new vaccinations seem to be following new cases in a few select counties, including Greene County. Still, it’s important to remember that vaccinations are best used as a tool before rates start to really climb.
This means that counties in the Ozarks are a key place where we need to see vaccinations climb immediately. When we combine those low vaccination rates with low existing immunity from infections in that region, because case rates have been so low, the Delta variant has an opportunity to spread quickly there.
If you like what you see here and don’t already, please subscribe!