Here’s the latest COVID-19 data from the Virginia Department of Health based on yesterday’s developments.
Total cases: 1,706, up 222 yesterday.
Total hospitalizations: 246, up 38 yesterday.
Total deaths: 41, up 7 yesterday.
Total tests: 17,589, up 2,245 yesterday.
And here, straight from Cranky’s Excel spreadsheet to you, the updated “doubling” time for key metrics:
Case count: 3.3 days
Hospitalizations: 3.7 days
Deaths: 2.9 days
Finally, we have a social justice alert! I can’t believe the racial bean counters haven’t seized on this yet. Here is the VDH breakdown of COVID-19 cases by race:
Source: VDH. Number of confirmed cases (first numerical column) and percentage of confirmed cases (second numerical column).
If we toss out the “race not reported,” we have a total of 659 cases. Of those, 26.5% are black, 60.5% are white, and 12.9% are other. Whites comprise 68.0% of the population, while blacks 19.2% and others. Therefore, whites are somewhat under-represented among COVID-19 patients and blacks over-represented.
Looking for explanations for this disparity, I think we can rule out the possibility that the COVID-19 virus itself is biased against blacks. That leaves one of two possibilities:
- The Northam administration response to the epidemic has been biased against blacks.
- Blacks are more likely to reside in densely populated urban areas where the population is more exposed to the disease, while whites are more likely to reside in western Virginia, which has been less affected by the epidemic.
- The percentage of “race not reported” is so large that sampling methodologies may be biasing the results, rendering them meaningless.
Have I missed something?
