COVID-19 Fighters' Tracking Map Continues to Clear

By Allison Bell

Slideshow April 24, 2020 at 05:05 PM

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The latest government COVID-19 pandemic report shows that new activity for COVID-19 and look-alike illnesses continued to slow during the week ending April 18, but that those illnesses still accounted for an extremely high percentage of all reported deaths.

Resources

The CDC's weekly COVID-19 report is available here.
The CDC's provisional COVID-19 mortality data table is available here.
An article about the previously weekly COVID-19 report is available here.

Because tests for COVID-19 are still hard to get, and because most mildly symptomatic cases of COVID-19 look roughly like the flu, or like cases of ordinary viral pneumonia caused by viruses other than the flu, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) supplements the COVID-19 data in the weekly pandemic reports with data for pneumonia and "influenza-like illnesses." To deal with the possibility that some new, unknown or unnoticed illness could be causing problems, the CDC also includes the same kind of data on "influenza and influenza-like illnesses" in its weekly flu reports, along with data on the total number of deaths from all causes. The numbers for the latest two or three weeks are usually incomplete, because some states take longer to send their data to the CDC than others. The latest COVID-19 report includes an influenza-like illness activity map showing that most of the United States has low or minimal levels of influenza-like, and that most states with changing activity levels are moving toward having lower illness activity levels. Much more of the activity appears to be due to COVID-19 than to true influenza, becauses, since the week ending March 7, the CDC has recorded 24,550 laboratory-confirmed cases of COVID-19, and just 2,971 laboratory-confirmed cases of the flu. New Jersey continues to have extremely high activity levels, Wisconsin continues to have moderately high levels of activity, and Idaho has moved from having a moderate level of activity to having a somewhat higher level of activity. The death numbers, which typically reflect the results of illnesses that started two to four weeks in the past, tell a different story. They show that deaths recorded as being caused by COVID-19, other flu-like illnesses and pneumonia amounted to about 22% of all U.S. deaths in the week ending April 11, which is four times the usual level, is higher than the CDC has shown on charts going back to the early 1990s, and might be the highest since at least the 1968 flu pandemic. For a map, a chart and state mortality figures based on the new COVID-19 report, see the slideshow above. (Wiggle your pointer over the first slide to make the control arrows show up.) For the provisional state mortality data for the week ending April 18, see the table below. *

Jurisdiction of Occurrence	COVID-19 Deaths	Deaths from All Causes	Total Deaths As a Percent of Expected Deaths	COVID-19 Deaths As a Percent of Deaths From All Causes	All Pneumonia Deaths
United States	24,555	654,798	96	3.75%	54,962
Alabama	113	11,553	90	0.98%	714
Alaska	-	789	78	NA	37
Arizona	156	14,756	101	1.06%	1,034
Arkansas	19	7,245	94	0.26%	485
California	813	64,633	97	1.26%	5,437
Colorado	392	9,936	103	3.95%	838
Connecticut	-	461	0	NA	29
Delaware	28	1,939	77	1.44%	108
District of Columbia	44	1,331	89	3.31%	146
Florida	674	50,784	99	1.33%	3,640
Georgia	335	18,158	88	1.84%	1,167
Hawaii	-	2,656	92	NA	182
Idaho	38	3,393	97	1.12%	185
Illinois	748	26,345	103	2.84%	2,269
Indiana	238	15,292	92	1.56%	1,299
Iowa	48	6,906	94	0.70%	493
Kansas	39	6,041	92	0.65%	407
Kentucky	70	9,957	84	0.70%	885
Louisiana	538	10,099	91	5.33%	668
Maine	26	3,562	99	0.73%	302
Maryland	444	12,494	102	3.55%	1,100
Massachusetts	1,016	15,550	105	6.53%	1,638
Michigan	1,264	24,499	103	5.16%	2,188
Minnesota	100	10,496	99	0.95%	762
Mississippi	117	7,408	97	1.58%	644
Missouri	117	14,006	89	0.84%	878
Montana	-	2,248	90	NA	132
Nebraska	21	3,696	90	0.57%	285
Nevada	99	6,003	95	1.65%	484
New Hampshire	42	2,974	99	1.41%	203
New Jersey	3,018	22,310	123	13.53%	3,031
New Mexico	28	4,003	85	0.70%	281
New York	3,567	28,773	118	12.40%	4,246
New York City	8,073	25,978	198	31.08%	4,741
North Carolina	0	9,131	38	0.00%	557
North Dakota	-	1,504	86	NA	135
Ohio	168	24,258	80	0.69%	1,382
Oklahoma	74	8,163	83	0.91%	717
Oregon	58	7,804	88	0.74%	417
Pennsylvania	690	25,641	77	2.69%	1,794
Rhode Island	31	2,075	80	1.49%	108
South Carolina	103	12,063	100	0.85%	720
South Dakota	-	1,814	90	NA	143
Tennessee	107	17,104	95	0.63%	1,289
Texas	256	44,867	92	0.57%	3,274
Utah	18	4,427	93	0.41%	262
Vermont	35	1,461	101	2.40%	99
Virginia	131	16,252	97	0.81%	864
Washington	463	13,384	97	3.46%	1,109
West Virginia	-	4,647	84	NA	332
Wisconsin	159	12,869	100	1.24%	739
Wyoming	-	1,060	97	NA	83
Puerto Rico	52	4,732	68	1.10%	664
The CDC notes that there is often a lag in reporting deaths and putting them in the mortality data, and that it leaves out the information when a cell would contain a number lower than 10. The "percent of expected deaths" column reflects the number of all deaths reported for the week ending April 18 when compared with the average for the comparable week of the year in 2017, 2018 and 2019.