Recent Surge in KY Covid-19 Appears to Moderate.

Presumed effect of masks and closings?

After three months of a slowly rising plateau of new Covid-19 cases in Kentucky, July began with a surge of new cases culminating with a spectacular and frightening peak of 977 new cases on July 19. In response, a mandatory face-covering order was put in place, bars were closed, restaurants were rolled back to smaller capacity, and private groups were limited to 10 people. It is likely that these public health measures blunted the rapid exponential rise, but daily reports of cases since the new maximum varied widely confusing interpretation. Nonetheless, we are not out of the woods yet. Yesterday’s (Aug 6) new cases were 513, but even this number is much higher than any daily count before July 11 (save for the aberrant and non-representative count of 577 on May 5).

Our recent surge is absolutely not the result of increased testing which hasn’t increased much at all since early May in any event. More to the point, there are more Covid-19 patients in the hospital today than at any time in Kentucky’s epidemic, and more in the ICU than any time since its opening days. These new cases are sick people who would have been recognized even if there was minimal testing! It is anticipated that an increase in reported deaths will follow. This latter may already be happening.

The following graphics illustrate our current state of affairs. The full updated panel of interactive data visualizations is available as usual on KHPI’s Public Tableau Website. In addition, I have extracted Kentucky’s historical county-specific Covid-19 data from the New York Times global database. I make an Excel file is available here. I believe this can be helpful in understanding better how our state version of the pandemic unfolded and to understand how to use the data collected by the state at the local level. Please help me explore it. Let me know what you learn. If there is interest, I will update the file more frequently.

The following bar chart shows the number of new cases since the first one in March. Things started to take off as public health measures were relaxed. Lots of things happened in July including major sports events, open bars, and public protests. People were coming out of their caves. I believe that exploring the county-specific historical data can help explain some of the apparent spikes and hope to write about this.

Even the 7-Day average of new cases presents a pretty “jumpy” picture.

A major driver of day-to-day variation in daily counts of new cases is the specific day of the week. The following graphic depicts the number of new cases broken down by day of the week. Sunday and Monday have historically been days of low counts due to the weekend breaks in data collection and reporting. You can explore this visualization here.

These new cases are showing up in hospital censuses. New peak hospital occupancies overall. There were issues with ICU reporting in the early days so a direct comparison may be misleading. Explore this graphic interactively here.

Comment:
This was an article in preparation. I wanted to get the updates out while still fresh. I will comment further after Saturday’s numbers are released. I have concerns shared by others about soccer, football, Derby, college openings, and other high volume gatherings. Folks who want to go ahead with Derby have used as justification that opening our professional soccer season in Louisville was safe. I am unaware of any outcome measure that allows us to know that! Both local and national reports related to college sports, especially football, are not reassuring.

Peter Hasselbacher, MD
Kentucky HealthPolicy Institute.
August 7, 2020

Addendum: Friday evening. Today’s new case count was up a little at 542. There were f new deaths. Hospitalizations still rising. Projections suggest a change in case trajectory for the better, although still rising.