Boston-Proper COVID-19 Update (30-Dec-2022 data)

Confirmed cases in Boston dipped last week, but that doesn't give us the full picture as we've seen from wastewater tracking and the various threshold parameters Boston has in place, which just points to people not testing at medical facilities as much and therefore not all cases being tracked.

Three thresholds for concern that had reached previously got worse:
Test Positivity rate:
Threshold: 5.0%
Current:   13.0% (up from 10.3% last week)

Number of neighborhoods with positivity rate >= 8.0%
Threshold: 4 or more (of 16 total)
Current:   14 (up from 11 last week)

Confirmed Daily Adult COVID-19 Hospitalizations (7-day moving average)
Threshold: 200.0
Current:     271.9 (up from 233.9 last week)

Thankfully, the occupied adult non-surge ICU beds got better and remains below the threshold, if just barely:
Threshold: 95.0%
Current:     89.6% (down from 93.7% last week)

Also the 7-day average emergency department visits per day hasn't increased for 7 consecutive days... with that said...
November's full-month average: 280.6 (up from 216 last year)
December's average so far: 325.4 (compared to 266.8 for the first 27 days of Dec last year)
Number of days with average > 300 in November: 9 (only 5 prior to Thanksgiving) (there were ZERO days in November 2021 like this)
Number of days with average > 300 in December through 27-Dec: ALL 27 (of 27) (there were only 4 thus far by this time in December 2021 like this)

All of this is to say that things are pretty bad in Boston right now.  Stay safe as you celebrate the start of 2023.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Switching to Wastewater Monitoring Only

Case counts were already somewhat misleading so, if people were actually paying attention to the wastewater and had a target and/or threshold for concern, that would actually be potentially a more reasonable thing to monitor... with that in mind, let's look at some time points to try to find some measures to consider.  Let's start with establishing a few thresholds.   Early on in the pandemic, we said 8 cases per 100,000 people per day was the highest threshold of concern (ie, that was the introduction to the highest risk-rating we had).  Later, we relaxed this a bit because we realized that this would keep us on high alert and never allow us to go back to normal ... sort of like saying that everybody is smoking so the threshold that for risking cancer shouldn't be smoking 3 cigarettes a day but instead should be a pack a day.  Based on this relaxing of concern, let's go ahead and add in 16 cases per 100,000 people per day as a threshold to monitor for, just as we did w
Read more

MA Wastewater Tracking (23-Jan-2024 data)

Image
See that little uptick at the end of each graph? This didn't happen in 2022 but did in 2023. We understood the goal in 2022 (to some degree) but since ... is there some portion of the population who says "covid spread must be down so let's go nuts"? I suspect this is partially colleges reconvening their students on campuses where in 2022 they were still trying to get their students to maintain some precautions and they haven't been since... but I also don't think this is just college campuses.
Read more

Fun with MA COVID-19 Reporting 18-Jun-2020 edition

For those of you who like to see fun with numbers and accounting of Covid cases in Massachusetts (and also to get depressed in the morning)... Yesterday's report included an increase in the overall number of probable and confirmed cases of 266 an increase in the overall number of confirmed cases of 180 a change in the number of confirmed and probable cases that were originally traced to the last 44 days of 171 That means that at least 9 newly found confirmed cases and at least 78 OTHER newly found probable cases FROM BEFORE 44 DAYS AGO were uncovered sometime between 4pm on Tuesday and 4pm on Wednesday. Once we get past 4 days, we only see single-digit increases/decreases in uncovered cases so those numbers seem to be relatively static. We are likely to get to the 7,750 dead mark today and the 8,000 dead mark by early July. Daily hospital admissions has only slightly decreased in the last 44 days but our number of people remaining in the hospital on a given day has decreased from a
Read more