This past Thursday, Franklin County, Ohio dropped to Level 2 in our four level guidance system for the pandemic. We have leveled down! So what does that mean? Level 2 or Orange in Ohio means that we are in "a public emergency, increased exposure and spread. Exercise high degree of caution." Sounds pretty bad right? But it's better than "Public emergency, very high exposure and spread, limit activities as much as possible." That's Level 3 where we've been at for weeks.
And how exactly does one change levels? This handy three minute video explains each of the four levels as well as breaks down the seven indicators or "strikes" that determine what level the county is assigned. The fewer indicators that are met the better we're doing. In moving to Level 2, four of the seven indicators have not been met: new cases had not increased for five consecutive days, new outpatient visits and hospital admissions have not increased, and our ICU occupancy threshold has not been crossed.
So what does Level 2 mean for us? Well, for one thing it means, according to the Department of Public Health, that schools may reopen if they choose. While many districts are planning to stick to remote instruction for now, others are rushing to reopen in-person instruction--some as soon as this Monday. My school has already been mandated by our conference to remain remote-only through Christmas so leveling down isn't changing anything for us.
I do wonder if our excitement over leveling down is perhaps premature. I wonder if these schools racing to open up won't find themselves rushing to shut down again in a few weeks time if we level back up (or worse yet, just deciding to take the gamble and stay open until an outbreak forces a shut down). I feel like a more sustained decline would be a better signal to let down our guard. Also, I've been privately tracking our cases in Franklin county daily and what I've found is that Franklin County has had an increase in new cases for the past five days after hitting a low of 91 new cases on July 23 (see my graph by clicking on this link . The other two counties represented on the graph are Lake County in Florida where my mom and siblings live and Montgomery County in the Dayton area where Barbara's mom lives): So I'm not sure what I'm missing that the experts at public health are seeing.
My data represents the numbers as of yesterday, Friday, August 28. I collected my numbers and charted my graph yesterday but was too tired to put it all together so I'm doing that now. As of yesterday we have had a total of 5,928,020 cases of COVID-19 and 181,684 deaths. This means we've added 147,425 new cases in the previous three days and 3,676 new deaths. This is quite a bit more than I'd predicted: (44,000 more cases and almost 2000 more deaths). The general decline we'd been seeing seems to be stalling out. Hopefully this is just a pause and by Monday, August 31 we'll see cases and deaths dropping again. Nonetheless, I'll predict a total of 6,082,149 cases by Monday, and 185,499 deaths.
If everything was down three days ago, everything is back up today (or yesterday anyway). All three states showed increases in new cases, with Nebraska in particular showing a large bump. It makes me wonder if the dramatic declines of recent days are more about delays in reporting, rater than a legitimate decrease that will sustain over time.
Total Cases
Florida: 615,798 total cases, 2.8% of the population
Ohio: 120,124 total cases, 1% of the population
Nebraska: 33,436 total cases, 1.7% of the population
New deaths are up this time around as well. This time it's Ohio that's showing the greatest surge, with the second highest number of deaths in three days for the state this summer. We've already established that when it comes to the death data, there is always an up and down pattern, but this increase seems to be significantly more than a simple correction of delays in reporting. It will be interesting to see where things seem to be headed in the final two posts of this series.
Total Deaths
Florida: 10,956, a rate of 1.8%
Ohio: 4,105, a rate of 3.4%
Nebraska: 399, a rate of 1.2%
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