August 15 to August 21

It’s been a week. Monmouth College welcomed their students back to campus. This means I’m back to teaching with all it’s usual stress plus the added challenges of delivering my classes remotely. It’s going OK. Meanwhile, the college finally made a public announcement about the staff cuts and looming faculty cuts that have been rolling out all summer. All of that came along with an objectively bad week on the pandemic front.

Warren County

We ended last week with an average positive test rate of 4.14%. After today’s report we have a weekly average positive test rate of 9.83%, more than double last week and over the 8% threshold set by the state of Illinois. In fact, we’ve reported a daily positive test rate above 8% for five days in a row. The Restore Illinois recovery plan states that three days in a row of rates at or above 8% is enough to warrant increased restrictions in a region or county. Don’t be surprised if Warren County gets called out when this data settles at the state level.

In terms of actual cases, we saw 22 newly reported cases this week where there were only 19 in the past two weeks combined. On August 16th there were 63 total tests covered in the report (4 postive, 59 negative). That’s the second largest number of tests in a single day ever. The most tests in a day happened in late July.

Daily test results and positive rate tracking are below.

Demographics

As if the sharp rise in positive tests rates and new cases weren’t enough, we saw three new cases in the 80-100 year old demographic. By and large, cases have been confined to lower risk age groups. We’re now seeing new cases in at risk age demographics. This is a new trend in Warren County and now one we should want to see continue.

The Region

The regional trends continue. The average number of new cases continue to increase with most of them coming from more urban counties. Below you can see a heap map for new cases over the past three weeks as well as a graphic for the regional totals and seven day average for that period as well. As you can see the region is largely in the yellow to red range. Remember that this data come from usafacts.org and usually lags behind by one day.

County Comparisons

As usual, we turn to cases per 100,000 people to compare the state of the pandemic on a county by county basis. I’ve been doing a three week time period but I’m shifting to just one week.

The state of Illinois looks for counties to have less than 50 new cases per 100,000 people per week. I’ve set the yellow to start at that point. Red kicks in based on recommendations from the Harvard group for numbers that indicate a level of spread that might require stay-at-home orders to get in check.

Finally, you can watch the shift in the seven day average of new cases per 100,000 over the past three weeks.