Category: Data Update

No surprises, although Massachusetts did hit several negative milestones in the past several days – test positivity rates of 10% for those newly tested, test positivity rates of 5% outside of higher education, and an overall test positivity rate of 3%. The total number of tests continues to increase, but slowly, and the percentage of first-time testers remains about 25%.

Hospitalization statistics are back to where they were in early to mid-July, but of course the numbers were headed down then, and they are now headed up.  Unfortunately, total hospitalizations are increasing at a faster clip – Massachusetts’ hospitals added almost 170 patients in the last 7 days compared to just under 100 in the 7 days prior to that.  It also appears that patients are a bit more ill than they were four weeks ago, as the percentage of hospitalized patients in the ICU, and percentage of ICU patients who are intubated are higher than they were.

A higher test positivity rate naturally leads to more cases – we’ve had over 2000 reported confirmed cases each day this week.  That number may drop Sunday and Monday, as reporting tends to slow down over the weekend.  The 7 day average of reported deaths, which had been somewhat held in check, hit 24 today for the first time since July 2.   On July 2nd, 70% of those deaths were in long-term care facilities compared to 53% today, which implies that healthier people are dying now.

Nothing good to report today. Test and case positivity rates are still increasing, and at a faster rate than before. No matter which measure of positivity at which one looks, the rate is double or triple what it was four weeks ago. The one exception is for repeat testers, for which the rate is approximately 50% higher, based on 7 day trailing averages. Test positivity is even increasing in higher education (albeit from a very low level), which had been the standout for quite some time. Keep in mind that there is a very large overlap between repeat testers and higher education testers.  Most people tested in higher education have been tested multiple times.

And of course, hospitalizations are rising too, and almost as fast as positivity rates. The 7 day trailing average number of ICU patients has more than doubled from four weeks ago, and the number of intubated patients has almost tripled.  Hospitals in the state added almost 20 patients per day over the past week  (this is not new admissions, but net new admissions including discharges and deaths).

The only slightly positive news is that deaths haven’t dramatically begun to increase (and given better treatment options this might be the case going forward). The 7 day average of reported deaths had stayed under 20 per day from mid-July until October 22 (over three months), but it hasn’t moved much higher since then (let’s keep our fingers crossed). Cases are skyrocketing of course, with the 7 day average tripling since four weeks ago.

This is the last post for this blog.  As many of you know, after election day, Covid disappeared. So there were no new cases, no new hospitalizations, and no new Covid deaths in Massachusetts today, nor will there be any going forward. There is no point in continuing this blog.

Just kidding of course. Unfortunately, the coronavirus news in Massachusetts is not good, and is continuing to get worse. The test positivity rate for newly tested individuals reached 7% today after being between 6% and 7% for twelve consecutive days. I’d been hoping we were at a plateau. No such luck. Positivity rates for higher education, which had been 0.1% throughout September and October, ticked up to 0.2%.  The number of tests each day continues to increase slightly, but the large increase in confirmed cases is not from increased testing, but from higher positivity.

As test positivity and cases rise, hospitalizations follow.   The 7 day average count of hospitalized patients, patients in the ICU, and intubated patients all increased by almost 25% or more in one week.  Particularly disturbing is that over 50% of patients in the ICU are intubated, the highest rate since early September.

Over 2000 new cases were reported today, and the 7 day average of new confirmed cases topped 1300, the highest amount since mid-May.  Deaths are holding steady.  It is unclear whether this is because of the lag from diagnosis to death, or because the current batch of covid patients is healthier compared to the spring. 

Happy Election Day. I’ve had some time to digest the new dashboard from Massachusetts and the file download that accompanies it. I’m disappointed in the changes to the dashboard, but it isn’t as bad as it looked at first glance. However, it seems to me that the state still is trying to highlight statistics that paint the pandemic in Massachusetts in a more positive light, as I noted yesterday.

First, new individuals tested and their test positivity rate are not shown on the dashboard (this is what I reacted to yesterday). The newly-tested positivity rate is significantly higher than the positivity rate for repeat testers and about 75% of all tests currently are for repeat testers. However the testing information for new testers is still in the data download, if not on the dashboard itself.

The second significant change is to the hospital reporting. The state now only reports confirmed covid hospitalized patients, ICU patients, and intubated patients. This led to a fairly sizeable drop (almost 30%) in the overall patient count based on October 31st data.  Presumably, the suspected case patients are still in the hospital, regardless of whether they are counted by the state in the official tally.  However, the state did provide a backhistory of these confirmed hospitalization statistics, so it is possible to compare these data over time.  In addition, the state dropped the ‘New Daily Admissions Report’ altogether.  I had used this in my data updates, and have a less than satisfactory replacement.

In general, the state’s reporting of hospitalizations has been quite poor. The state’s cumulative hospitalization figures never matched that of hospitals, and once the state went to weekly reporting of hospitalizations by age group, the fourteen day totals in the weekly report never came close to matching the totals from the race / ethnicity report. I had used the race / ethnicity report to calibrate my estimates for hospitalizations by age group.  Furthermore, the state dropped the race / ethnicity report from the dashboard in this latest update.  As a result, it’s unclear that I’ll be able to provide meaningful estimates of hospitalizations by age group going forward. 

Test positivity rates have held steady for the past several days – the first somewhat positive news in the last several weeks.  With the dashboard revision, the state appears to be providing daily, rather than weekly, updates on higher educational testing (not all the changes made by the state were misguided).  I’ve included them in this report.  As I’ve indicated in prior posts, higher education positivity rates are extremely low, and almost half the testing in the state since September 1st has been for higher education (https://www.masscoronavirus.net/massachusetts-college-testing-update-october-26-2020/). This higher ed testing has kept “all test” positivity lower than it would be otherwise, as Table 1 shows. 

I’ve revamped the hospitalization report shown in Table 2.  As noted previously, I’m now using the state-provided data for confirmed cases only.  In addition, I’m now showing the average daily net change in hospitalizations, ICU patients, and intubations over the last week.  For example, there has been an increase of 12 net hospitalizations over the past week, meaning that there are now approximately 84 (12 times 7) more hospitalized confirmed patients than one week ago.  The increase in the number of hospitalizations is greater now than it was four weeks or even one week ago. 

The structure of Table 3 is unchanged.  The 7 day average of reported confirmed cases remains above 1,000, even though the state reported only less than 1,000 confirmed cases for the past two days.  The death rate is holding steady, but has gone up a bit over the past several weeks.  Now that the state has converted all the graphics on its ‘Dashboard of Public Health Indicators’ graphics to 7 day trailing averages, you will notice some difference between my figures and those provided by the state for the number of cases and number of deaths. 

This is because I am calculating the 7 day averages using the cases and deaths reported each day, and the state is calculating its averages using the cases and deaths on the day they occurred (the “as-of” date), rather than the day they are reported.  I favor the state’s approach, but only with a lag to account for the fact that there is a lag in the reporting of deaths and cases so that the most recent days undercount the eventual totals for those days.  Consequently, I expect that the numbers reported on the ‘Dashboard of Public Health Indicators’ will tend to be lower than those I report.

Happy Halloween. Our ghoulish story continues – no surprise there. Test positivity rates are up across the board – particularly among the newly tested. Overall test positivity has increased as well.  Roughly three-quarters of all tests are for repeat testers.

Not surprisingly, hospitalizations are increasing as well,, but not as rapidly as the increase in cases, as the average age of new cases is lower than in the spring. We’re basically at the same point we were in early-to-mid July, but hospitalizations were decreasing then, and they are now increasing.

Cases continue to rise, with reported confirmed and suspected cases above 1,000 for ten consecutive days.  Deaths are also slowly increasing, but the trend now is for a lower percentage from long-term care facilities.

The cat’s out of the bag, and it isn’t going to be easy getting it back in. We hit two milestones today – 7 day average test positivity for the newly tested is now 6% and the 7 day average of reported confirmed cases is over 1000 per day. It took 16 days for test positivity to increase from 2 to 3%, 17 days to increase from 3% to 4%, then 7 days from 4 to 5%, and 6 days to reach 6%.

All the hospital statistics hit highs not seen since early-to-mid July.  The 7 day average of hospitalized patients is up 8% from one week ago, and the count of patients in the ICU or intubated is up more than 25%.  New hospitalizations are up almost 20%.  Enough said.

As expected, cases are leading the charge, presumably indicating that even more hospitalizations and perhaps deaths will follow.  The 7 day new confirmed case average has increased by almost 50% in a week, and more than doubled from 4 weeks ago.  The number and proportion of deaths in long-term care facilities declined, but since the average number of deaths has stayed the same, this means that people dying are generally younger and healthier than before. 

This is another graphical data update, similar to the one for October 3, because it provides long-term context to analyze Covid trends in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, we’ve once again passed a negative testing milestone – several days ago the 7 day average positivity rate for newly tested individuals reached 5% for the first time since June 3rd. Figure 1 shows testing positivity rates.

Figure 1 indicates that test positivity rates for newly tested individuals have been steadily increasing since late August after a long period in which they had been very low. In contrast, positivity rates for repeat testers have stayed low – increasing very slightly from 0.2% to 0.3% during October. The “all-test” positivity rate is a weighted average of the repeat tester and new tester positivity rate, and has increased for about a month, but relatively slowly. Over 75% of all testing is for repeat testers, holding the overall testing positivity rate in check.

Figure 2 shows hospitalization trends, with the total number of hospitalized patients on the right-hand axis, and the number of ICU patients, intubated patients, and new hospital admissions on the left hand axis. All the hospitalization metrics have been rising gradually since Labor Day, but at a slower rate than either cases or individual positivity. This may be in part because the case demographics have shifted younger compared to early in the pandemic, requiring fewer hospitalizations.

Figure 3 shows total confirmed and suspected cases on the right-hand axis and long-term care deaths and total deaths on the left-hand axis. The 7 day average number of cases has almost tripled since Labor Day and is now higher than on June 1 and rising very rapidly.  This case increase is not from increased testing, but is from higher positivity rates. Today’s newly reported confirmed cases topped 1000.  In contrast, deaths have stayed relatively constant since the end of July. Since June 1, 70% of all deaths have been from long-term care facilities. Of course, deaths (and hospitalizations) lag cases by at least several weeks, so it’s a bit early to discern longer-term trends.

The adverse trend continues. The 7 day positivity rate for newly tested individuals is 4.5%. Overall testing has flattened out, at least in the short-term, both for repeat testers and new individuals. The percentage of repeat testers is closing in on 80%, which has helped keep the overall test positivity rate in check, as repeat tester positivity is still 0.3%.

Overall hospitalizations are relatively stable and haven’t risen as rapidly as cases, even accounting for lags from diagnosis to hospitalization. In the last four weeks, the 7 day case totals have almost doubled, but hospitalizations are up only 38% and have been level for over a week. The number of patients in the ICU has held steady since the end of September.  In contrast, new confirmed hospital admissions are at their highest levels since the end of June.

The 7 day average of new cases continues to rise, roughly commensurate with the higher positivity rate.  Deaths in long-term care facilities are back near their long-term average of about 70%, and the overall number of deaths remains high.