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Today is Friday, July 3. In case I can't keep my days straight, I've now added a whole column in my #COVID19 spreadsheet to dictate the day of the week. Since it's a long weekend, how about some data fun facts?
In Maryland, the largest number of tests for #SARSCoV2 were performed on a Wednesday. (117,199 tests done that day of the week.) Thursday is the next popular at 109,927 performed that day of the week. Monday was the lowest at 76,231.
So far, the state has announced the most new cases on Fridays. There have been 11,742 new cases of #COVID19 announced on a Friday. Thursday has the next highest with a total of 11,406 announced that day of the week. The fewest were announced on Tuesdays.
Deaths are a little weird because of reported vs actual date of death. So the state has announced the most new deaths from #COVID19 on Tuesdays (570). Saturdays and Wednesdays have the next highest number of deaths reported, with 502 deaths reported on each of those days.
But Friday has the most deaths due to #COVID19, with 505 people dying from the disease on that day of the week. Of course, this might change because once again, I've found errors with the state's date of death dataset.
Unsurprisingly, the largest number of tests were performed in June, with 304,665 tests done. That's 76,360 more than done in May.
But despite the large number of tests, the largest number of new cases, deaths (by date), deaths (reported) and hospitalizations were in May.
Ok, here's Friday's data: There were 538 new cases reported by @MDHealthDept, making two days in a row with more than 500 cases. The state now has 68,961 cases. That number will almost definitely surpass 69,000 tomorrow, and it's likely that next week, it'll surpass 70,000.
There were 13 more deaths reported, bringing the state up to 3,099.
But hospitalizations continue to fall with 422 current hospitalizations. That's the lowest it's been since early April. ICU numbers were at 143 (-6) and acute care numbers were at 279 (-13).
However, the 7-day rolling average positivity rate is 4.92, in large part due to a positivity rate of 5.94 yesterday. (That was the highest single-day rate since June 13.) The avg. positivity rate is the highest since June 25.
So what does this all mean? The data show that there are more cases, especially in the past two days, but deaths and hospitalizations continue to drop or plateau. This would suggest #SARSCoV2 is still circulating but there are less serious cases. Still, the virus is not gone.
In other words, just wear a mask. If you want this pandemic to end, wear a mask, social distance. Make smart choices.
Oh, and in terms of Anne Arundel County, cases are up by 21 and deaths are down by 1. So looks like there was a reporting error when it comes to deaths. The rate of cases per 100,000 residents in the county is 897.7.
