The Virginia Department of Health (VDH) has released its COVID-19 update, and I’m back into panic mode. The number of reported new cases leaped to 563 yesterday, the biggest number yet. What I had tentatively described yesterday as a respite in the exponential rate of increase over the weekend turned out to be an artifact of data collection, a slowdown in reporting to the VDH, not a slowdown in the spread of the virus.
So, rest assured, we are all still doomed.
Here are the updated statistics. For the sake of continuity, I have stuck with VDH statistics for most metrics. However, I am adding new metrics from the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association website that are useful in tracking degrees of severity of the disease: COVID-19 patients in ICUs and using ventilators.
Total COVID-19 cases: 3,333, up 455 from the previous day
Total hospitalizations: 563, up 66 from the previous day
ICUs in use: 408, up 21
Ventilators in use: 283, down two
Total deaths: 54 to 63, up nine
Total tests: 28,645, up 4,124
% tests positive: 11.0%
Here are John Butcher’s “doubling” calculations:
Case count: 3.5 days
Hospitalizations: 3.7 days
Deaths: 4.8 days
The hopeful sub-text to the latest numbers is that they do not actually represent an acceleration of the spread of the disease.
— JAB
