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  Today in Health it a Covid update. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current. And engaged. I just want to ask you once again, have you signed up for CliffNotes? CliffNotes is a service we offer at this weekend Health It.

It's a great way for you and your staff to stay current. We know you don't have time to listen every day to our show, but we develop CliffNotes to keep you informed. It's an email that goes out 24 hours after each show airs on the channel with a summary, key moments in bullet point format, and two to four short video clips.

Subscribe on our website this week, health.com. Just click on the subscribe button. Or have your team subscribe as well and get the discussion started on the right foot. All right. Here is today's story, and before I go into it, I'm just gonna do a little rant. I wish people would prioritize their objectives before they do anything on social media.

I'm doing this show, it's probably the fourth one I've done where I go through the covid numbers in some detail so that people are informed. If you'll permit me just one moment of frustration. I continue to be underwhelmed by healthcare professionals who are more politically motivated than they are motivated.

About caring for the people in their community. Social media posts that are designed to whip people into a frenzy with a political bent and an MD behind the Twitter profile is counter to the profession. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate a good thought out argument with data, but that is not what I see on Twitter.

I see a pack of wild dogs being thrown red meat by politically active physicians. That's my rant for the day. Now let's get to the numbers so you are informed. And these are, again, straight from the reputable sources that you would go to, CDC website and others that are readily available plus headline clippings around the keywords like vaccine mask mandates and those kind of things that you would normally get from a headline clipper that's out there, which we use on the show pretty frequently.

So first thing. Here's some data insights. This is gonna be the part that whips you into a frenzy. New cases increased 34% week on week. These are our seven day daily averages. They've gone from 67 7,000 to 89,000 cases per day. Again, seven day daily average. Uh, new confirmed. COVID-19 hospital admissions increased 40% week on week from 5,506 to 7,707.

Admissions per day reported COVID-19 deaths increased 35% week on week from 280 to 377 deaths. Again, seven day daily average positivity rate up. 1.3 percentage points, 8.222 9.51%. Okay, so it's increasing. But anytime you look at numbers, you have to understand what does it mean for it to be increasing.

We're going to dig into that in a minute. Next thing you have to look at obviously is the vaccination rates. 348 million C 19 vaccine doses have been administered in the United States. If you're wondering what that is, it's 58% of the population have received at least one dose and 50% of the population.

Are fully vaccinated. These are good numbers. We're making progress in that area. Let me go into the numbers a little bit more down here. In January, we were looking at 300,000 cases in a particular week. Now we're looking at roughly a hundred thousand cases. So again, we had gotten down to a very low number just last month, and it has gone up.

That is reason for alarm, but not panic. So we've gotta be careful how what we're looking at 4,000 deaths in January. We're now looking at roughly 600 deaths. Based on where that chart's coming in. Confirmed Covid Hospital admissions 17,000 in January. You're looking at 7,000 right now. It's interesting to me that number is higher.

It may be that people are, are more inclined to go to the hospital now than they were back in January. Maybe they were afraid of going to the hospital and we've gotten past that a little bit. I'm not really sure. Maybe people are more . Leery of any kind of covid diagnosis. So they want to get to the hospital as quickly po as possible.

I don't know. Who knows what's really going on here, to be honest, I, I just report on the numbers. I can't speculate as to why they're happening. Let me talk about the regional trends, 'cause those are important. Because as I said, this is not being experienced the same across the entire nation. There are hotspots for sure, and so I'm looking at the heat maps on this case rate by county, and it's almost exactly what you think it is.

The Southeast, the case rate has gone up significantly Northeast. It's pretty low. Upper Midwest, pretty low, but again, you have some hotspots in Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana. Washington State, Oregon, California, Arizona. So it's not entirely in the, uh, southeast, although it is, uh, more acute in the southeast, but if the case rate is high, one of the things that's very different from this map, I.

Then the maps we would've looked at last year is the death rate is much lower. You're looking at 89,000 average daily case counts and only 377 average daily deaths in the last seven days. And so instead of a big red ball that you would think in the southeast, what you have is little spots in the southeast where the the deaths are occurring.

And we have some challenges in Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi. Uh, a little bit in Texas. Couple spots in Texas, couple spots in Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and I guess Montana as well. But the death rate does not correspond to the case rate at this point. It is much lower, and I think that is due to the fact that a lot more of the population has been vaccinated.

So that is good. A, a bunch of the. Population has already had covid. Again, I'm not a doctor. This is my speculation. So even if you get covid the second time, again, the severity if you are vaccinated and you've had covid before, does not seem to be as high. And so the vaccine is a very important deterrent.

For us, it's a, a very important weapon for us against the virus, and so we have to continue to push for vaccinations where it is appropriate, but understand that some people, some populations are still not gonna get it. They have accepted the risk. And they're likely going to get covid. The good news is they are not as likely to die from Covid than they would've been this time last year.

And so we are making progress, but that doesn't mean we're out of the woods. We have some challenges with hospital capacity, so that's always been the concern here is that we were gonna overwhelm the hospitals and there are some areas where we have ICU capacity issues and inpatient capacity issues as well.

And those are, let's start with the IICU capacity 'cause that's probably the most important. Northern Florida parts of Alabama, Mississippi, uh, Louisiana obviously is a hotspot right now. A northern Arkansas, Southern Mississippi, uh, a bunch of places in Texas, Arizona, some California, Washington state, some capacity issues as well.

So again. You almost have to look at this as a regional challenge. How much capacity do we have in a region and do we have enough to handle the cases? We do have some people that are not doing elective surgeries again. because of hospital capacity and ICU capacity. So obviously in that southeast corridor there's gonna be some of those challenges.

Inpatient capacity, pretty similar to what I just said. Southern California, Arizona are acute. Northern Florida is acute. Louisiana has some challenges as well as Texas, and I'm not trying to minimize those. Those are significant issues when you fill up an ICU and uh, you cannot take trauma patients from other places.

This is a serious issue. We should really try to avoid ever being anywhere close to a hundred percent capacity in our ICU beds. If for no other reason, there could be other disasters. You're talking the southeast during hurricane season. Anything is possible at this point. So we've established the vaccine is a very significant weapon against the virus, so let's take a look at those numbers in a little bit more detail.

Doses delivered the US has delivered 400, 3 million doses and doses administered 348 million. So 60 million doses still sitting on the shelves somewhere ready for you to go and get your vaccine. 50% are fully vaccinated, as we talked about earlier. Well, uh, an interesting number here also is people 65 years and older, those that are most at risk is almost, at 80% of the population are fully vaccinated, 65 years and older.

So we're doing a good job there. And that is pretty good. So vaccine trends, we can look at the vaccine trends by state. I think it would be interesting for people to know that Florida's smack dab in the middle. It's not the worst. It's not the best. Vermont is the best. If you're wondering, Hawaii is second best.

Part of that could be smaller population. Part of that could be programs that they put together. Education. I'm not really sure what that is. But Vermont, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, New Mexico. Pennsylvania's doing pretty well as well. So you have some of those Florida against smack dab in the middle, surrounded by Oregon, Utah, Wisconsin, on either side, Virginia on either side.

As we talked about. This is Florida alone. And then you go to vaccinations, 22 million, 23 million roughly. Total doses administered. 58% of the population has at least one dose, and 49% has been fully vaccinated. So again, you're almost at that 50% number. Let's compare it to the sophisticated California, which is a state I just came from 4 million cases.

So 53% to 50% in terms of full vaccination, Florida versus California and Florida, 58%, one dose versus 65%. So California's clearly doing a little bit better. Than Florida, but not enough based on the, uh, news coverage that you would see out there. And I would just say living in Florida, my experience is that people are fairly cautious.

People are aware that there is a pandemic going on. They're not as wild and wooly as you would think. So those are the numbers we're looking at. The vaccine rate's pretty good. Across the country and actually there's an uptick, I think somewhere there's a chart in here that shows the uptick in the trend is going up in terms of people

Going to get vaccinated now with this spike, and that is a, a, a good sign. So we're seeing an increase. I can't find the number in front of me right now, but that number is positive and going in the right direction, and that is going to bode well for the future. So that's about all from the numbers that I have.

My so what for This is. That again, we have to be careful when we're looking at numbers. I used to have a friend who was an accountant that said, you can make the numbers say almost anything you want 'em to say, and we are seeing that in on full display right now. So take the numbers, put 'em in context.

We learned this in analytics and in data science all the time. Understand what you're looking at, understand also the regional variations on that. And what's driving those regional variations. It may not be vaccines, it might be other kinds of programs or lifestyle, or could be demographics, could be any number of things that are driving the case counts.

Don't listen to every politically motivated tweet that you see out there. That's all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Apple, Google, overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, you get the picture.

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