December 26, 2020 - Jefferson County On Fire

Jefferson County On Fire

December 26, 2020

It’s the middle of Christmas weekend and holiday reporting will blur the data for the next few days. Remember - tomorrow is Sunday, which means the data to be reported then will be collected today. And the data to be reported on Monday will be collected on Sunday. Those are typically the lightest-reporting days of the week because many testing centers are not open. Therefore, it will be Tuesday before reporting gets back to normal, and we won’t begin to see the damage wrought by the holidays until early January. 

With that disclaimer, ADPH reported a total of 4,657 cases (incl. 679 probables) over the last 2 days, more than I expected. On Christmas Day, the average positivity rate for the prior 7 days was between 35% and 38%, according to BamaTracker and Johns Hopkins. The rate declined slightly today. 

Hospitalizations remain high - 2,470 confirmed patients in just 96 reporting hospitals. That’s an average of 25.73 patients per hospital. If a full complement of 105-110 hospitals were reporting, there likely would be somewhere between 2,700 and 2,800 patients. As hospitalizations have risen, so too has Alabama’s death rate … We are now 8th in the nation in reported deaths per capita over the last 7 days. 

According to The Covid Tracking Project, the state with the fastest growing rate of infection per capita this week happens to be California - 92.2 per 100K population - followed by Tennessee at 88 per 100K population. Alabama is 4th with 77.9 cases per 100K population ... and our rapid rise is being led by our largest metropolitan area surrounding Birmingham, which is in Jefferson County.

This week, Jefferson County has seen 105.8 new reported cases per 100K population, which is 15% higher than that of California. Of the 10 most populous counties in the State, only Morgan County (home of Decatur) has a faster current rate of growth (113.2 per 100K). Jefferson’s per capita case count is twice that of Mobile County (51.9 per 100K) and nearly double the rate in Montgomery County (55.9 per 100K).

To give you even more context, Jefferson County (population 658,000) has reported 4,851 cases in the last 7 days, while Norway (population 5.4 million) has reported 3,071 cases; Finland (population 5.5 million) just 1,703 cases; and Australia (population 25.6 million) a grand total of just 182 cases over the same 7-day period. There will be those who say it’s not fair to compare an Alabama county to Australia, a sovereign nation surrounded by water that can close its borders. But, why can’t Jefferson County compete with Finland, a nation of more than 5 million people sandwiched between Russia and Sweden, two nations with very high infection rates? 

Some day, when this pandemic is in the rear-view mirror, studies hopefully will expose why the U.S. is uniquely inept in its battle against this virus. I hope someone also will explain why Alabama has been uniquely unable to contain this virus, leading the South in per capita infections ... virtually ever since this summer.  The totals:

12/12 - 4066

12/13 - 2790

12/14 - 2264

12/15 - 3638

12/16 - 4107

12/17 - 4695

12/18 - 5348

12/19 - 4221

12/20 - 2548

12/21 - 2380

12/22 - 4979

12/23 - 4758

12/24 - 3625

12/25 - 1032