Number 1 shows COVID-19 is spreading more in Maine than elsewhere, but it’s not the full picture

[ad_1]

Maine appears to have risen to the top of the nation judging by a measure that attempts to gauge the extent of the coronavirus spread.

Yet even as infections increase, Maine still outperforms most other states on metrics epidemiologists use to track the pandemic on a day-to-day basis, and which they say present a more complete picture of the virus’s spread. The state still experiences much lower rates of daily new cases, hospitalizations and positive test results than most countries.

Commonly referred to as R, the reproduction number is intended to gauge the average number of people who will catch the coronavirus from a single infected person, a number greater than one signifying that an epidemic is growing and less than one signifying it. will eventually decrease.

By this measure alone, the virus has recently spread at a higher rate in Maine than in just about every other state, according to an online model developed by researchers at Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health and a another developed by a software group. developers who include the founders of Instagram. They each assigned Maine a recent breeding number of around 1.45.

But scientists are issuing a number of caveats about the reproduction number value, which cannot be calculated in real time and must instead be modeled using older data.

These models are based on “a good number of assumptions,” according to Dr. Peter Millard, former epidemiological staff at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and assistant professor at the University of New England.

While it’s generally helpful to know if the breeding number is greater than one, Millard said, it won’t help identify the latest trends that epidemiologists need to react quickly and publicize to contain the pandemic, such as an outbreak. in a nursing home or the spread of the virus in a rural town.

“I don’t think that’s a reliable statistic that would be of much value in Maine,” Millard said.

Patterns of breeding numbers can also be easily changed in states such as Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont which are now seeing an increase in the coronavirus after having had relatively low numbers of cases throughout the pandemic, according to Robert Long, a spokesperson for the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

“This is neither bad nor wrong. But that does mean that a state like Maine, which was stable at 20-30 cases / day, will look “peak” when we go down to 40-60 cases, let alone 150-200, “Long said. “That’s what happens when you look at the relative percentage differences more than anything else.”

Over the past two weeks, Maine CDC director Nirav Shah has publicly presented the data behind these mathematical models, according to Long. He said a “more relevant” measure would show the incidence of the virus per capita.

Public health experts frequently point to the growth in new cases and hospitalizations, as well as the portion of tests that come back positive, as some of the most revealing measures of the impact of the pandemic on a condition.

On Tuesday, despite the steadily rising number of cases in the state, the seven-day moving average of daily new coronavirus cases in Maine was still one of the lowest in the country. Maine has recorded an average of 1.45 new cases per day per 10,000 people over the past week, placing it 43rd in the country, according to data from the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University.

According to the COVID Tracking Project, the seven-day average of Mainers hospitalized with COVID-19 has fallen from 10 hospitalizations per million people at the end of October to 37 per million, but it’s still well below the national rate of more than 150.

Maine’s test positivity rate is on average 2% over the past seven days, according to data tracked by Johns Hopkins University. This rate has increased in recent weeks, but remains the second lowest in the country, with only Vermont having a lowest.

[ad_2]

Source link