White House Task Force Team Sees 'Aggressive, Unrelenting' COVID-19 Spread

COVID-19 trackers working for the White House Coronavirus Task Force have found that the virus that causes COVID-19 is now spreading out in the community in an "aggressive, unrelenting" way. The pandemic is "reaching most counties, without evidence of improvement but rather, further deterioration," the COVID-19 trackers write in the new report, which covers the week ending Nov. 13 and was released Nov. 15.

Resources

• A copy of the White House Coronavirus Task Force weekly report is available here.
• The CDC's weekly COVID-19 report is available here.
• An earlier article about COVID-19 data is available here.

"Current mitigation efforts are inadequate and must be increased to flatten the curve to sustain the health system for both COVID and non-COVID emergencies," the COVID-19 trackers say in the report. The task force COVID-19 trackers are preparing weekly national and state-level reports for use by the task force and by state and federal public health officials. The task force is not making the reports available to the public, but public health officials have started making the reports available to news organizations. The version of the report used for this article was the report for Kansas. It was posted by the Kansas Reflector, a nonprofit Kansas news organization. CNN, CBS News and other organizations also have posted versions of the reports. WABE — a radio station in Atlanta has posted the Nov. 15 report for Georgia here. The Pennsylvania Department of Health posts the task force reports for Pennsylvania here. In the Kansas version of the latest report, for example, the White House task force COVID-19 trackers said that Kansas had 619 new cases per 100,000 residents, compared with a national average of 294 per 100,000 The COVID-19 trackers said they are "are encouraged by the bold steps Kansas is taking to find the asymptomatic individuals to slow the spread" but would like to see the state do more to get people under 40 to get tested. Georgia had 117 new cases per 100,000 residents. All that figure was below the national average, it put the state in the "red zone" for cases, meaning that the state had 101 or more new cases per 100,000 residents.

Mortality

Tables in the Kansas and Georgia reports show that the United States experienced 7,608 COVID-19 deaths in the week ending Nov. 13, and 2.3 deaths per 100,000 lives. The COVID-19 trackers ranked North Dakota and South Dakota as the states with the highest number of COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 residents but did not give the actual number of death counts. Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin were the high-population states with the most counties reporting two or more COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 residents for the week ending Nov. 13. — Read U.S. Death Gap Grows: Demographer, on ThinkAdvisor. — Connect with ThinkAdvisor Life/Health on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.