The number of available Critical Care Beds in area hospitals increased to five with the release of the Georgia Emergency Management Agency Situation Report COVID-19 late on Wednesday.
The Tuesday Situation Report had listed only one Critical Care Bed available at the area’s 11 hospitals. On both Monday and last Friday, no Critical Care Beds has been reported to be available.
The Georgia Emergency Management Agency clarified on Wednesday that hospitals are asked to provide their data on bed availability by noon each day and that the information reported is not more than 24 hours old.
The Georgia Department of Public Health Reported 196 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the 10-county Northeast Health District on Wednesday, pushing the seven-day rolling average of added cases to 152.0, its highest level ever.
The Northeast Health District added one death attributed to COVID-19 in the Wednesday Daily Situation Report, of a 57-year-old male in Clarke County with a known chronic condition.
The death was the first reported in Clarke County resulting from the disease since June 4 and brings the county’s total to 16.
The seven-day rolling average of added deaths from COVID-19 in the Northeast Health District remained unchanged at 0.3.
The Department of Community Health Long-Term Care Facility Report for Wednesday listed one new COVID-19 positive staff member at a personal care home in Walton County and one new COVID-19 positive resident at Pruitthealth–Grandview and at University Nursing and Rehab Center, both in Athens-Clarke County.
Additional Local Details
Every county but one in the 10-county Northeast Health District added cases in the Department of Public Health Daily Status Report on Wednesday.
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Oconee County was the exception, and it actually lost a case. Clarke County gained 50 cases, and the total number of added cases in the last 14 days is 102 in Oconee County and 512 in Clarke County.
The Georgia Emergency Management Agency had not responded to my requests for additional information on the data provided in its Situation Report COVID-19, but Houston Gaines, who represents me and the rest of the 117th House District in the Georgia General Assembly, was able to get a response on my behalf.
The data on beds in use are gathered each day before noon, the Agency told Gaines, so while the report is a snapshot at only one point in time, that snapshot is a very current one.
Region E consists of all of the 10 counties in the Northeast Health District plus Franklin and Hart counties.
Number Of Hospitals
According to the database of the Healthcare Facility Regulation Division of the Georgia Department of Community Health, 11 hospitals serve that region, with the largest being Piedmont Athens Regional and St. Mary’s in Athens-Clarke County.
Two of those hospitals do not have emergency rooms, and, according to the information provided to Gaines, do not provide data for the Daily Situation Report.
The Situation Report includes numbers of beds available and in use at the nine hospitals, including Critical Care Beds. The beds in Intensive Care Units are called Critical Care Beds.
According to Leapfrog Group, a nonprofit watchdog organization that gathers information on hospitals, Piedmont Athens Region has 36 ICUs, and St. Mary’s in Athens has 18.
Officials at Piedmont Athens regional had earlier reported the 36 ICUs and said the number could be expanded to 74.
The Daily Situation Report lists 70 Critical Care Beds in its Region E, with 65 of them occupied in the Wednesday report.
State Data On Cases
Across the state on Wednesday, according to the Department of Public Health Daily Status Report, 3,271 new COVID-19 cases were reported, and the seven-day rolling average of added cases dropped just slightly from 3,722.1 on Tuesday to 3,716.0 on Wednesday.
The Situation Report has recently begun not only reporting the cumulative number of cases but also the new number added that day, but it has made subtraction errors in the Tuesday and also Wednesday reports.
I checked the underlying database of cases on all three of the last days to confirm that the error was not in the report of the number of cases, and it was not.
On Tuesday, the Daily Status Report listed 175,052 cumulative number of cases, and on Wednesday it listed 178,323.
The difference is 3,271, not the 3,373 listed in the Daily Status Report. The difference between Monday’s and Tuesday’s figure was 4,209, not the 4,293 listed in the Daily Status Report.
Other State Data
The Department of Public Health listed 79 deaths in the Wednesday Daily Status Report, with 55 of them in the last 14 days.
The seven-day rolling average dropped slightly from 44.1 on Tuesday to 43.9 on Wednesday.
The seven-day rolling average of deaths by date of occurrence rather than date of reporting increased on Wednesday over Tuesday. On Tuesday it also had increased.
The Georgia Emergency Management Agency reported 3,188 Current Confirmed COVID-19 Hospitalizations on Wednesday, the highest number ever reported going back to May 1, when the Agency began releasing these data.
The number of ventilators in use, however, declined from 1,270 on Tuesday to 1,215 on Wednesday.
The Department of Community Health Long-Term Care Facility Report on Wednesday listed 602 facilities with COVID-19 cases among its residents and/or staff, down from 604 on Tuesday.
Facilities self report and are not supposed to remove themselves from the list once they have filed a COVID-19 case, but some do without any consequence.
Charts
Charts 1 to 5 below are based on data from the Department of Public Health Daily Status Report and have been updated to include data from the release of that report at 2:50 p.m. on Wednesday.
Chart 6 is based on data from the Georgia Emergency Management Agency Situation Report COVID-19 and has been updated to include data from the late afternoon report on Wednesday.
Charts 1 and 2 include data from the 10-county Northeast Health District of the Department of Public Health, which includes Oconee and Clarke counties.
Chart 3 presents data for Oconee and Clarke counties only.
Charts 4 and 5 show data for the entire state of Georgia.
Chart 6 includes, in the main chart, data for the state of Georgia and, in the inset, data for Region E of the Georgia Emergency Management Agency, which includes Oconee and Clarke Counties, the remaining counties in the Northeast Health District, and Franklin and Hart counties.
Click on any of the charts to enlarge it.
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1 comment:
Although some countries in the world have indeed flattened the curve to very few new cases, this is not the case in the US and certainly not in Georgia where the "curve" is a straight line up since the reopening as shown by the graphs on this blog and on the Ga Dept of Health web site. And, also unfortunately, over 150,000 people in the US have died of this disease, including Herman Cain recently after a month of hospitalization. I suspect he received excellent care and every treatment possible to no avail. So, I would not take this disease lightly. I wish that were not the case.
Jeanne Barsanti
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