The First 1000 Cases

According to the Illinois Department of Public Health, as of Tuesday, November 24, Warren County crossed the 1000 reported cases threshold with 106 cases and 19 deaths. At this time the Warren County Health Department is reporting 991 cases and 20 deaths. It’s typical that these numbers are close but don’t match. We can expect the IDPH to report the 20th death tomorrow and at the same time, the WCHD to report the 1000th case. As the county crosses the 1000th case threshold, I wanted to put this number in context.

Is that a lot?

The usafacts.org dataset provides case totals, death totals, and populations for every county in the United states. We can turn to this dataset to understand how our 1000 cases compares to the rest of the state and the nation as a whole.

• 1000 people represents roughly 5.9% of the county’s population
• 20 deaths out of 1000 infections puts us at about a 2% death rate. According to data from usafacts.org, this matches the national death rate. It’s above the statewide death rate of 1.7%.
• 1000 cases in a population this size of Warren County equates to about 5,937 cases per 100,000 people.
  • According to Usafacts.org, as of November 23, only 20 of the 103 counties in Illinois and only 550 of the 3195 counties in the United States have reached 5,937 cases per 100,000 people. This puts us in the 80th percentile in Illinois and the 82nd precentile nationally.
• 20 deaths in Warren County equates to about 119 deaths per 100,000 people.
  • Only 24 counties in Illinios have more recorded deaths per 100,000 people. Only 743 counties in the United states have more. This puts us in the 77th percentile in the state and the nation for deaths per 100,000 people.

Relative to the rest of the state and the rest of the country, yes. Having 1000 recoreded cases and 20 recorded deaths at this point in the pandemic is a lot.

How did we get here

The Warren County Health Department reported the first case of COVID-19 288 days ago on April 10, 2020. On October 26th we crossed the 500 case threshold with a total of 507 reported cased of COVID-19. That’s 199 days from the first reported case. It’s been 29 days since then and we’ve racked up another 500 cases. We accumulated our second 500 cases nearly 7 times faster than our first 500 cases. For another look at the accelerating pace of the virus, you can look at the time it takes us to accumulate 100 cases over the course of the pandemic. The table below lists the dates we crossed each 100 case threshold, the actual case count on that date, and the time that elapsed since crossing the previous 100 case threshold.

It’s been four days since we crossed the 900 case threshold. At this point we’re accumluating 100 cases every 4-5 days. At that pace we’ll be nearing 2000 total cases by the end of the year.