Previous Article For Context
Responses From DHHS, Dr. Stoddard, And Others
I wanted to thank Dr. Earl Stoddard, DHHS, Councilmember Friedson and County Executive Elrich for responding to our questions today.
Here are some of the responses which acknowledge and attempt to explain the discrepancies.
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Issue With Counting Alternate Care Sites
The alternate care sites are including patients not from Montgomery County. While this shows hospital availability, the CDC uses this metric and counts it against the size of the population to look at per 100k people rates.
What this means is that when we count people not in MOCO, the numerator (top half number of division) is increasing but the denominator (bottom half number of division based on MOCO population) is not being changed.
This creates an unreliable metric that is not based on just our county and a big part of the difference between our County and the CDC.
Additionally, even looking at our Hospital Service Area 61 per the below tween by Phil Kerpen, he says that the CDC looks at this entire area for their hospitalization metrics which would seem to include these other areas so it is very confusing.
Massive Data Outlier on 7/22
If you go back to look at the data what started all of this interest in this metric is that the rate jumped huge on 7/22 which pushed the county to believe it was in the “High” community category.
This metric of “COVID-19 hospital admissions per 100k residents (7-day total)” jumped from 8.7 on 7/21 to 11.8 on 7/22.
The surrounding days also had pretty large increases but this day alone had a 35.6% jump which is just huge when we’re talking 7 day total.
Using an approximate population size of 1 million people this would represent actual numbers of 118 – 87 = 31 increased total cases in a single day from the previous 87.
Councilmember Friedson commented back that he is looking into the 7/22 data outlier to see if there is something else going on.
Conclusion
DHHS has suggested that we should be back to “Medium” by this weekend and this is possibly even without removing the outlier so that would be good to ease people’s fears.
City of Gaithersburg has removed it’s required masking for camps based on the move to “High”.
I think that when it comes down to it this will be the result of either a data dump or a data entry error.
In the future, I would request that DHHS and the executive team be a little more cautious when looking at large single day jumps to look into what is going on before changing status and stirring up a bunch of fear.
More Reading
Go back to the original article on this:
The MoCo Show also did a piece on the follow up’s to our questions from County officials.
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