Name: How to read the numbers on COVID-19
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How to read the numbers on COVID-19

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Mary Landersmlanders@savannahnow.comView CommentsIn monitoring the deluge of data that accompanies the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s helpful to keep it in context, understand its shortcomings and focus on our local area.With these goals in mind the Savannah Morning News has reworked the daily data update we publish both in print and online. We’ll still be providing the cumulative and new cases in Georgia and Chatham County every day but we’re adding a graph that shows at a glance if cases numbers are leveling off. We’re also using the most reliable data to produce a “case fatality rate” that gives a sense of how severe local cases are.The data comes from a variety of sources. The state’s Department of Public Health publishes updates on its three times daily now and the updates on the local data twice daily. The Department of Community Health issues not-quite daily and deaths among both residents and employees. Finally, the Georgia Emergency Management Agency on the availability of ventilators statewide and on hospital beds regionally.The numbers includes case counts, death counts, demographics, case rates and caveats on much of the data. Lots of caveats.Trends and benchmarksCoastal Health District Director Dr. Lawton Davis looks at several key figures each day including the number of new cases and deaths in the eight-county coastal health district. Chatham, the largest county, tends to set the pace. Because he looks frequently he has a feel for the trend. And the trend is what most people should focus on, he said.To make it easier to see actual trends and not get caught up in the variables like testing backlogs, he looks at seven-day averages. That is, for each day the district records and graphs the average of the increases over the previous seven days. tells the progress of the pandemic.“So if you want to know where we are on the curve, the seven-day average is probably a better look than most other measures would be,” he said.Davis cautions, though, that today’s case numbers are reflective of what was happening in the community two weeks ago when the test was taken or the symptoms first appeared.A also shows the trend.Colin K. Smith, a clinical assistant professor in the School of Public Health at the Georgia State University, said he’s focusing on a number Georgia previously calculated but no longer includes on its website, something called the case fatality ratio.It’s the number of deaths from COVID-19 divided by the number of diagnosed cases.“And theoretically, what I am looking for is that number to go down as we diagnose more cases because we're looking at a CFR something like 4 or 4.25 percent, which is very high,” Smith said."It should be somewhere around 1% and we’re looking for that number to go down as we diagnose more cases, because that tells me then that we are catching the population more, the people who may be who may be positive that don't have severe enough cases to actually die.“Smith would also like to see positive tests go down as a percentage of all tests, too.By Tuesday, May 12 about 13.2% of the completed COVID-19 tests reported statewide have come back positive. It was about 14.9% on May 5.Dr. Nadia Abuelezam, assistant professor and an infectious disease epidemiologist at Boston College Connell School of Nursing, said many states are looking at percent positive as a “helpful indicator.”“The idea is to see it become steadily low. For many other conditions we’re usually in that 5% range. So you know, seeing the 5% would be really encouraging.”Abuelezam spoke to the Savannah Morning News via Zoom May 5 in an interview made possible through the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Sciline program.“Because then that suggests that we're away from that early part of the epidemic where we're testing only people we presume to be positive, and now have sort of gone to a general testing strategy,” she said.Abuelezam and others are looking to see what happens to Georgia’s numbers after being among the first states to reopen."And knowing that there's sort of this two-week lag and symptoms that perhaps you could see this reemergence of the infection in a week or so since people went back to normal activities,“ she said. ”So you could see that number fluctuate, which could indicate that you're not sort of at that low epidemic potential period.“CaveatsMuch of the data we have on COVID-19 in Georgia is incomplete.Take hospitalizations, for example. The state indicates that the number hospitalized tallied on its website are only those who were hospitalized at the time of their case was reported to DPH. It is not the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases currently hospitalized. And it probably underreports the cumulative number of COVID-19 hospitalizations.Smith said it “shocked” him that the state was reporting this number, given its caveats about it.“I was kind of surprised when I found this out the number that they are publishing hospitalizations,” he said.The number of tests completed is “not reflective of the number of persons tested because multiple tests might be performed per individual,” DPH reports.In an email DPH Spokeswoman Nancy Nydam said that the number “includes public and private labs that report to DPH.” It’s unclear if all private labs repeat all negative tests, as they are not required to do so.The number of tests completed daily is not currently reported directly, though it could be calculated by looking at the previous day’s numbers.“There are updates being worked on for the Daily Status Update and daily testing information is included in that,” Nydam said. “I don’t know when it will be ready, but they are currently working on it.”The Coastal Health District doesn’t regularly keep track of this data either. At the Chatham County Commission meeting Friday CEMA’s Dennis Jones reported a total of 3700 tests had been performed countywide and there were 285 cases at that point for a positive rate of 7.7 %. That rate again includes all positive cases recorded for the county but not all the tests done by private labs.Race is not specified in Georgia’s data for more than 10,000 of the confirmed cases, nearly 30%, making it harder to draw conclusions on the demographics of those impacted by the virus.Nursing home numbersCOVID-19 cases in nursing home residents and staffers make up almost 50% of the cases statewide. But the picture is different in the Savannah area.Of the 311 cases reported in Chatham County by Tuesday, 44 cases or about 14%, were in five long-term care facilities.As of May 8 there were seven Chatham County facilities still waiting to be tested by National Guard teams for COVID-19.Of Bryan County’s 61 cases, 21 were reported at one facility, the Bryan County Health and Rehab Center. That’s 34%.Only one of Effingham’s 39 cases came from a long-term care facility. That’s about 3%.All of savannahnow’s coverage of coronavirus is being provided for free to our readers. Please consider supporting local journalism by subscribing to the Savannah Morning News/savannahnow.com at savannahnow.com/subscribenow.View Comments

Mary Landersmlanders@savannahnow.comView CommentsIn monitoring the deluge of data that accompanies the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s helpful to keep it in context, understand its shortcomings and focus on our local area.With these goals in mind the Savannah Morning News has reworked the daily data update we publish both in print and online. We’ll still be providing the cumulative and new cases in Georgia and Chatham County every day but we’re adding a graph that shows at a glance if cases numbers are leveling off. We’re also using the most reliable data to produce a “case fatality rate” that...

How to read the numbers on COVID-19

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