Covid-19 News and Information

[Bill Robertson]

^^^^^^^
I’d go so far as to say that MOST of the people I know who’ve tested positively recently did so via home testing and in many cases quarantined without even calling their own doctor to let them know about it. That’s all fine and good, but those cases don’t make it into the count at all. I think the days of daily test counts meaning anything are long gone.

Through January we had about 20 employees test positive and quarantine. All of them that I've talked to were home rests.

[oklip955]

And the folks that I know that came down sick just assumed they had it. They never tested and later talked to their doctor and their doctor said they most likely had covid. Some just did not want to be part of the statics.

[fortpatches]

That is why it is also important to look at the positivity rate, not just the number of people that are positive.

The lower the positivity rate is, the better we know the positive count corelates to the actual positive count. The higher the positivity rate is, we know that the positive count is not as close to the actual positive count.

But, yes, people not reporting their at-home tests as instructed is causing tracking problems. This is likely artificially raising the positivity rate. With some more data though, Im sure the data scientists can come up with a way to account for it.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/...reported-cases

Experts say there’s always been a disconnect between the reported coronavirus case counts and the truth. Because many people who catch the virus experience few or no symptoms, many infections go unreported.
Similarly, test positivity rates tend to be inflated because the people most likely to show up at a testing center are the ones with COVID-19-like symptoms. Large organizations that require all their members to be tested regularly invariably have lower positivity rates than sites that test only people who think they might be sick.
Testing more people more often, as a number of other developed countries do, could help identify outbreaks and limit their spread. But for a variety of reasons, a growing reliance on at-home rapid tests kits may not help public health officials in their battle to track and understand the pandemic.
https://www.latimes.com/science/stor...robably-no-one

Here are some resources about positivity rate
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2020/co...rcent-positive
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019...ositivity.html

Using test positivity and reported case rates to estimate state-level COVID-19 prevalence and seroprevalence in the United States
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbi...l.pcbi.1009374

[Pete]

986 new cases today. Last several Tuesdays: 2,435; 8,810; 3,853; 5,011; 4,110; 2,443.

Hospitalizations are 1,696 (-190).

ICU is 350 (-52).

[Bill Robertson]

Another thought on ICU's still showing as full when the numbers are falling. This might have been said already and I missed it but here goes. Just a thought. I have no idea if I'm right.

I wonder if hospitals count all ICU patients in the daily count but only proper ICU beds when they post capacity. For instance. Say Mercy has 50 proper ICU beds but added 20 "adapted" rooms used as ICU beds. Do they post available ICU beds including "adapted" beds or do they only consider ICU beds available when they have proper ICU beds open. I could see doing it that way since "adapting" beds for ICU also means using staff not normally in ICU to take care of patients.

[Urbanized]

Another thought on ICU's still showing as full when the numbers are falling. This might have been said already and I missed it but here goes. Just a thought. I have no idea if I'm right.

I wonder if hospitals count all ICU patients in the daily count but only proper ICU beds when they post capacity. For instance. Say Mercy has 50 proper ICU beds but added 20 "adapted" rooms used as ICU beds. Do they post available ICU beds including "adapted" beds or do they only consider ICU beds available when they have proper ICU beds open. I could see doing it that way since "adapting" beds for ICU also means using staff not normally in ICU to take care of patients.

This is a good question, but one definite explanation is that patients progress through their illness over the course of time, so case counts can be plummeting but ICU counts still going up because of that lag. Meaning some people who got sick during the height of the curve don't make it into ICU until sometimes even weeks after first falling ill.

[king183]

That is a good question and, unfortunately, the answer depends on how the hospital reports it. Each hospital has their nuance on how to report their metrics, which is disappointing because it makes analysis much more difficult. Typically, they will not include “adapted”beds in their capacity. There is one major hospital in the OKC metro that “adapted” another hospital building to enhance their capacity and I believe they do count those “adapted” bed in their capacity.

The other thing to keep in mind is the that ICU numbers aren’t necessarily linear. Typically, a patient goes from general, acute hospitalization to ICU and then, if they survive, back to acute hospitalization and then are released. Sometimes, however, they can go back into the ICU if they have a setback, so the ICU number will go back up or have a small change even as overall hospitalization numbers fall.

[Bill Robertson]

Urbanized and king183, I know all of that to be correct. I was just attempting to reason how ICU bed count can have dropped by 78 since Jan 28 but all the hospitals on the report show no available beds.

[Pete]

1,711 new cases reported today. Last several Wednesdays: 4,588; 8,160; 10,001; 5,507; 3,914; 2,443; 1,482.

The state has now passed 1,000,000 total cases.

Hospitalizations are 1,682 (-14).

ICU is 358 (+8).

[soonerguru]

Urbanized and king183, I know all of that to be correct. I was just attempting to reason how ICU bed count can have dropped by 78 since Jan 28 but all the hospitals on the report show no available beds.

Bill, my physician, who is part of the Saints network, told me that St. Anthony and other hospitals were sending people out of state last month because there weren't beds. So, even if numbers were to drop suddenly that doesn't mean full capacity is restored. It just means we are still close to full but no longer sending people out of state for care.

[Bill Robertson]

Bill, my physician, who is part of the Saints network, told me that St. Anthony and other hospitals were sending people out of state last month because there weren't beds. So, even if numbers were to drop suddenly that doesn't mean full capacity is restored. It just means we are still close to full but no longer sending people out of state for care.

I know that also. All I was suggesting is that maybe ICU beds won't be listed as available on the bed capacity report until actual in-the-ICU beds are open.

[Pete]

^

Keep in mind, ICU beds are pretty full just in the normal course of things. Given the crazy spike due to the last round of Covid, I'm sure lots of procedures and other medical issues were stalled as long as possible just simply due to lack of beds.

[Pete]

2,678 new cases today. Last several Thursdays: 4,968; 13,428; 13,406; 10,502; 6,280; 4,166; 1,917.

Hospitalizations are 1,715 (+33).

ICU is 364 (+6).

[Pete]

2,230 new cases today. Last several Fridays: 4,027; 8,655; 13,939; 11,315; 6,438; 3,974; 1,011.

Hospitalizations are 1655 (-60).

ICU is 357 (-7).

[Pete]

For the week ending Friday:

12,456 new cases. Last several weeks: 38,816; 72,774; 83,356; 59,393; 28,655; 14,728; 8,304.

Hospitalizations were -321.

ICU is -49.

[soonerguru]

^
Thank you for faithfully reporting this data every day. The week by week analysis is particularly helpful.

[David]

Pete, by any chance do you have this data in an Excel or Google Docs spreadsheet? Seems like it could be a source for useful analysis for the pandemic.

[Bunty]

2,230 new cases today. Last several Fridays: 4,027; 8,655; 13,939; 11,315; 6,438; 3,974; 1,011.

Hospitalizations are 1655 (-60).

ICU is 357 (-7).

It's a good thing cases are going down, since Stillwater Hospital reported Wednesday that 63.1% of its 19 covid patients were not vaccinated, likely its lowest figure ever. It's covid testing stats has dropped to a 30% positivity rate.

[OKC Talker]

Urbanized and king183, I know all of that to be correct. I was just attempting to reason how ICU bed count can have dropped by 78 since Jan 28 but all the hospitals on the report show no available beds.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/m...ng-nurses.html

I thought this was a good article for those who had questions about how "available beds" keep changing. Call it "supply and demand" or "the free market", the problem is that hospitals have been emptied of their staff and can only take care of patients when they have the warm bodies to do so, usually with emergency staffing by travelers, nursing professors, or military nurses like the people interviewed here.

I've included a quote from the article since no one clicks on links but the full article explains much more and is worth a read:
"The following year, the demand for travel nursing broke loose from Covid. In April and May 2021, as case counts dipped, hospital requests for travel nurses only grew exponentially. “They now know what pent-up demand does to a health care system, and it’s not healthy,” said April Hansen, the group president at Aya Healthcare, one of the largest providers of travel nurses in the country. “If you look at our demand today, it looks like our demand pre-Covid in terms of specialties: med surge, telemetry, I.C.U., emergency room, surgical. It’s just the volume that is being asked for in every specialty.”

It isn’t the traveling-nurse boom alone that has transformed the market. There are also more job opportunities beyond the bedside than ever. Nurse practitioners treat patients in doctors’ offices; insurance companies employ thousands of nurses; Microsoft and Amazon have hundreds of open nursing jobs. Today, only 54 percent of the country’s registered nurses work in hospitals. “There was competition for talent before the pandemic,” Hansen said. “But the pandemic took a small crack and made it as wide as the Grand Canyon.”

To make things worse, the nursing shortage is part of a worker shortfall that spans the entire health care industry. “This is labor across the hospital,” said Rose O. Sherman, an emeritus professor of nursing at Florida Atlantic University. “This is respiratory therapy. This is lab. This is dietary, environmental services. They have not been immune to having an Amazon warehouse open up and losing a significant chunk of their staff.” If labs are backed up, patients have to wait for a diagnosis. If rooms aren’t cleaned, nurses step in to do the work themselves. Barraza has been known to empty bedpans when the housekeeper is too busy.

Even as hospitals have scrambled to hire travel nurses, many have been chafing at the rising price tag. A number of states are exploring the option to cap travel-nursing pay, and the American Hospital Association is pushing for a congressional inquiry into the pricing practices of travel-nursing agencies. Sherman, however, believes that the problem will not be solved until hospitals start considering how to make bedside jobs more desirable.

After two years, nurses have borne witness to hundreds of thousands of deaths. They have found themselves in the middle of a politicized illness and faced countless angry, grieving family members. Many, now, are moving on. They are looking for jobs outside the hospital. Others are simply uprooting themselves — leaving their homes and their families and continuing to do their jobs for a higher salary. “Nurses have finally learned what they’re worth,” Nora Shadix, one I.C.U. nurse, told me. “I don’t think they’re going to go back to the way it was before. I don’t think they’re going to settle.”"

[Pete]

All numbers are dropping like a stone...

Only 378 new cases today, the lowest in a few months.

Hospitalizations are 1,129. That's -526 since Friday.

ICU is 231, -126 since Friday.

[jerrywall]

Are we far enough that we can consider this drop to be a real drop, and not a temporary dip due to the weather or such? Either way, I hope it continues this way.

[mkjeeves]

This was reported on the 6th. It seems this would weed out unreported case errors.

TULSA, Oklahoma -

The latest available results from sewage testing indicate community transmission of COVID-19 has dropped recently in Oklahoma City but continues at high levels in Tulsa.

The results, reported by the Oklahoma Water Survey office at the University of Oklahoma, measures levels of the virus in wastewater, which typically is an advanced indicator of reported individual cases by 7-10 days.

“Omicron showed up and had a sharp rise in Oklahoma City about a week before it did in Tulsa in the wastewater. And Oklahoma City over the last several days has taken a sharp drop off. We haven't seen that sharp drop-off in Tulsa but if it reflects Oklahoma City, but a week behind like the rest of the Omicron wave coming in, I'd suspect we'll be seeing that in Tulsa as well,” said Dr. Jason Vogel, who directs the Survey.

https://www.newson6.com/story/6202ec...-oklahoma-city

[OkiePoke]

Not many people left to infect right now.

[kukblue1]

Not many people left to infect right now.

Not allowed even though we are at 1 million PCR positive test. So 1 million for sure plus people that didn't know they had it or the people that tested at home. Plus vaccination and the fact the doctor on news 9 said we are getting some herd immunity.

[Bill Robertson]

Are we far enough that we can consider this drop to be a real drop, and not a temporary dip due to the weather or such? Either way, I hope it continues this way.

I believe it's time to consider it real. All 50 states are dropping. Most like rocks. To add, Canada is down to about 25% of peak and Mexico is about 30%. So the whole of North America is looking pretty good.
Let's just hope another round isn't coming.