September 27 to October 3

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last weekly report. My usual practice of including two weeks of prior data means that you can see a bit about the missed week in this report. If you’re reading this near the time of publication, then you can also see some weekly data for September 20 to September 27 on the daily dashboard.

This past week was notable for two reasons: the announcement on October 1 of the county’s third COVID-19 related death and on Friday, October 2 a report of nine new cases was released. The report from 10/2 is, itself, also notable for two reasons. First, a total of 9 cases is enough for us to cross the state’s weekly case number threshold and we achieved that in a single day. A report of 9 cases is also notable because it’s tied for the third highest single day total since the start of the pandmic. The other time we received 9 cases in a single day was May 1. The higher single day totals occured back in the spring as well: 10 cases on 4/19 and 13 cases on 4/23. We’ve hit 8 and 7 new cases in a single day a few times recently. Every time we see numbers that rival or eclipse the kinds of reports we got back in the initial springtime outbreak I get a bit concerned. It doesn’t seem like progress nor recovery to me.

Warren County

Now for the graphics. We’ll start with the daily test results. From this graphic you can mostly make out that cases numbers are down this week compared to last week. Both weeks were above the IDPH threshold for significant community spread.

If we look at this week in terms of test positivity, then we once again see improvement compared to last week. However, it’s worth noticing that the regional trend last week was a decline in test positivity where here in Warren County we were moving quickly in the other direction for most of the week. We started down by the end of last week and continued down through most of this week, but in the last few days have shown signs of ticking back up.

Finally, the demographics. Over the past few weeks we have seen a rise in cases in the 10 to 19 age range as well as continued cases in the 80 to 100 range. The former group is problematic for schools where the later is the age group that accounts for two of the county’s three deaths. The hightest number of youth cases in a single week is 5 cases and that was last week.

Regional

The regional snapshot doesn’t have the peak last week that we had in Warren County. None the less, there are continued signs of moderate to substantial community spread throughout the area and the regional totals show the same kind of tick up at the end of the week that we saw here in Warren County.

If we look at cases per 100,000 across the region we see moderate to substantial spread in many counties.