Covid-19

After my previous post on the age of COVID-19 cases in Maryland, it was logical that I write about the age of COVID-19 deaths in Maryland. So far, media and State Departments of Health all agreed that the older someone is, the more risk this person has to die from coronavirus. So far, this is unfortunately also true in Maryland. In the graph below, we clearly see that people 50-59 years old have more than 250 deaths, people 60-69 have more than 500 deaths, people 70-79 have more than 750 deaths and people 80+ have nearly … 1,5000 deaths! The graph at the bottom also clearly shows that people in age categories 60 and above provide most of the new daily deaths due to COVID-19 (even if we came back down from a peak at about 40 deaths in 80+ at the end of April). ...

We recently heard in the US media that, if COVID-19 affected more the older population, beginning of 2020, the younger population was now more affected, especially young adults (various reasons were mentioned: the various academic breaks, being more active or “forced” to work, the sentiment of invincibility …). I wanted to see if one could see a similar trend in Maryland. If you look at the section of the Maryland population by age (graph below), as of today (July 9, 2020), you see that cumulatively, people 30-39 have the majority of cases, followed by people aged 40-49, 50-59 and 20-29 years old. There are relatively few cases above 70 years old and fewer cases below 20 years old. ...

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, we suspected and saw that nursing homes and other facilities where people are grouped together (prisons, …) could be at higher risk of transmission. The focus on nursing homes was because deaths seem to disproportionately affect the older population that also resides there. And nursing homes are also home for frail people with comorbidities. In its dashboard, the Maryland Department of Health quickly started to build a dedicated page with numbers from different “congregate facility settings”. As I did for other metrics from this dashboard, I made a chart of what seemed the cumulative total cases, differentiating staff (who are stuck working there) and residents (who stuck living in these facilities): ...

The recent Black Live Matters protests made me think a lot - as a white man, as a husband and dad, as a biologist by training, as a health economist by day, as someone interested in COVID-19 data where I live by night … as a human, in summary. I don’t have grandiose pieces of advice or any deep thoughts, not for here (but if you call me, we can talk ;-)). Here, let’s continue our exploration of COVID-19 data in Maryland. ...

On its dashboard, the Maryland Department of Health is reporting confirmed deaths due to COVID-19 in two ways: by date of report and by date of death (updated as amendments to the death record are received). The definition of confirmed death is: A death is classified as confirmed if the person had a laboratory-confirmed positive COVID-19 test result. What I was intrigued is that reporting seems to follow a pattern influenced by the day of the week (see figure below). The top chart (cumulative) is just an addition. A plateau would be welcome: it would indicate death rate is slowing down. Today, the COVID-19 death rate is 41 / 100,000 population. The bottom chart shows the number of deaths due to COVID-19 reported each day: the black line represents the number of deaths each day they were reported; the grey line represents the number of deaths each day they occurred. ...

A publicly-available MD COVID-19 metrics that I didn’t investigate much is cases per ZIP code. I created a dashboard where you can highlight one zip code at a time. Tyler Fogarty built a cool Treemap Explorer. Silver Chips has a nice heatmap of all zip codes as part of their extensive dashboard (a bit like the MDH dashboard). How can we make sense of all this? A classical way to see it is to look at the daily number of positive cases, similarly to what I did for counties or the state. ...

Since May 14, 2020, Maryland is carefully reopening from an easy lock-down caused by coronavirus spreading thru the community (and all over the world). In this post, I’ll go through all the variables we have on the MD Health Department dashboard. But first, the official data comes from the MD dashboard and if you want scientific information about COVID-19, please consult the CDC website. If you are interested, you can read my previous posts on COVID-19 in Maryland from this page. ...

In my previous post, I was wondering if Maryland was ready to reopen, ready to enter Stage 1 of COVID-19 recovery. I also mentioned, in the end, that if Gov. Hogan announced the reopening of Maryland, he also gave counties the power to “fully” open, to be partially open or even to remain closed. You can see more info about Maryland Strong: Roadmap to Recovery: there is a map of what Counties decided. ...

A visual analysis of Governor Larry Hogan’s decision to enter Stage 1 of reopening Maryland. (This will be a post based on a thread of tweets I posted on May 14 with updated graphs for today - one days after the start of Stage 1 - and more) Maryland is in state of emergency since March 5, 2020 due to COVID-19. Governor Larry Hogan announced on May 14 that Maryland will " gradually reopen with flexible community-based approach" ( the official declaration is here). The MD Strong plan said " a 14-day downward trajectory of benchmark metrics - or at least a plateauing of rates - is required before recovery steps can begin". This Phase 1 started yesterday, May 15, 2020. So, are we there already? ...

Since a few weeks, I report the raw number of COVID-19 deaths in Maryland counties. If this gives an idea of the cumulative number of deaths - which is interesting - it doesn’t reflect the fact that some counties have more inhabitants than others. That’s why I plotted below the number of COVID-19 deaths adjusted for the population (i.e. the COVID-19-specific death rate): Today (May 16, 2020), in terms of absolute number of deaths, Montgomery, Prince Georges and Baltimore County are the top 3 counties (this is the same for cases but not in the same order). In terms of confirmed deaths per 100,000 population, the top 3 counties are Kent, Prince Georges and Montgomery. ...