Is the Hudson Valley winning against Omicron?
First and foremost, since it’s the end of the year, I wanted to send heartfelt wishes to all my readers for their particular end-of-year celebrations, warm wishes to you and yours!
Now that we are reaching the end of the second (SECOND!) year of the pandemic, we’ve learned a number of very critical things from the data. To begin, it is now indisputable that the vaccines work. Second, we have a wider array of tools and techniques that increases survivability of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), but areas with low vaccination rates still see high incidences of hospitalization and severe disease progression. Third, youth and physical fitness is in no way, shape, or form, a preventative or prophylaxis for this virus.
The first thing I want to call out on this viz is the map, as it should orient you clearly to where this is happening. In the lower right corner of the map you’ll notice a land mass arching towards the blue dots, and that’s the trailing end of Queens, as it begins to morph into Long Island. The blue dots bending towards the bottom edge of the map area all in Yonkers or Mt. Vernon, indicating proximity to the political borders of Westchester County, NY where it abuts The Bronx, NY. That blue dot all the way at the top to the left approaches the northerly extreme of the County where it collides with Putnam County. The viz in the tooltip demonstrates the number of inpatient beds occupied at that hospital (grey bar) versus the number of inpatient beds occupied by confirmed/suspected COVID-19 patients. This is important because, at least according to one interpretation, those patients are not in the ICU (I’ll show you how I determined this later.) Not in the ICU means that fewer people are experiencing severe disease requiring critical care (from COVID-19, anyway.)
The BANs section of the dashboard really teases out the proof for that last statement. Of the 232 total ICU beds available in the County, 139 are currently occupied. However, of those 139 that are currently occupied, only 12 are occupied by confirmed or suspected COVID-19 cases. I’m leaving this here on purpose because it’s an object lesson in always looking under the hood of your data. There is actually only one hospital reporting 12 of their ICU beds being utilized by COVID patients with 89 ICU beds in total being utilized at that same hospital (of an available 104.) The rest of the hospitals in the study reported “N/A” for ICU beds being utilized by known/suspected COVID-19 patients. Using the total known ICU beds occupied by patients suffering from the pandemic and dividing by the total known occupied ICU beds in the study yields 8.63%, a much less startling number. Further investigating the County level fatality rates supports this assertion: the number of unfortunate losses due to COVID does not appear to be mushrooming as you would expect if severe disease were again rampaging through our section of the valley.
What are potential reasons for this? One interpretation is our comparatively high vaccination rate: 75%+ of our population has a completed vaccination course. ~85% has at least one dose, and 95%+ of the 18+year old population has at least one dose (data as of 12/26/2021.) That by itself is a significant topic since medical professionals remarked that to reach the vaunted ‘herd immunity’ stage, 70-80% of the population needs to be fully vaccinated. But this is just our county, and we don’t exist in a vacuum. Another interpretation is, our weapons and capacity for fighting the disease have also evolved, and we are getting better at preventing disease progression from spiraling out of control. However there are a number of other potential interpretations, and I don’t want this blog to spiral out of control.
A minor sub-note: the data utilized in this study is current as of December 10, 2021. There’s a bit of a data lag (one of the extra reasons mentioned) so, I could revisit this in the future. In the meantime, feel free to reach out via LinkedIn, my website, Tableau Public, or Twitter.
