Yesterday WJAC TV reported that Cambria County had the highest rate of new cases in the nation. Looking at the New York Times COVID-19 today, the county (which is listed a Johnstown because the county is the Johnstown metropolitan statistical area) ranks 6th today. Last week I posted on the elevated mortality rate in the county since Trump came here. This week I will look at the distribution of cases and testing in Cambria County.
On April 26th this is what the distribution of cases looked like for Cambria County at the zip code level. You can see a lot of white zip codes where there are no cases. I started tracking testing at the zip code level on May 12. On that day, 56.3% of the testing in the county was in the greater Johnstown area which I define as the zip codes 15901 through 15909. The cases were not tracked then because if the cases were between 1 and 4 in that zip code, the exact number of cases was redacted.
The second map is from July 1 where we can see clustering of cases around Johnstown in the southwest corner of the county and in Ebensburg which is in the center of the county. On this date 55.4% of te testing was in the Greater Johnstown area. The cases in many zip codes were still redacted at this time.
This image is from October 27th. In this image I have the 15901 zip code highlighted which is downtown Johnstown. There were 30 confirmed cases there and the number of probable cases was redacted because there were between 1 and 4 persons with this designation to protect individual privacy. We can also see an increase in cases in the 15931 zip code where Ebensburg is located with 200 cases. The increase in Ebensburg is at least partly due to an outbreak at the local county jail. On this date, 47.8% of the testing was in the Greater Johnstown area while only 36.4% of the cases were there.
The image above is from today ,December 13. We can see that the 15901 zip code now has 172 conformed and 19 probable cases for a total of 191 cases. The 15904, 15905, and 15931 zip codes are darker colored because they have more than 500 cases. Today 46.7% of the total test results are in Greater Johnstown (and thus 53.3% of the testing is in the remainder of the county) while only 40.2% of the cases are (with 59.8% of the cases in the remainder of the county). This indicates that the rise in testing in the remainder of the county lags behind the rise in cases there. Greater Johnstown accounts for 50% of the county's population. The table below shows the rates of testing and cases for each Johnstown zip code, Ebensburg and Cambria County. There's no room for US and Pennsylvania data on this page but you can see it on google sheets at the Johnstown zip code testing tab.
|
Zipcode
|
15901
|
15902
|
15904
|
15905
|
15906
|
15909
|
total
Johnstown
|
15931
(Ebensburg)
|
Cambria
County
|
|
Population
|
3,384
|
11,488
|
15,018
|
19,942
|
10,047
|
5,232
|
65,111
|
9,148
|
130,192
|
|
Testing 12/13/2020
|
1300
|
3091
|
4485
|
6042
|
2862
|
1530
|
19,310
|
3832
|
41,322
|
|
Testing rate 12/13/2020
|
38.42%
|
26.91%
|
29.86%
|
30.30%
|
28.49%
|
29.24%
|
29.66%
|
41.89%
|
31.74%
|
|
cases 12/13/2020
|
191
|
376
|
731
|
920
|
341
|
268
|
2,827
|
798
|
7,029
|
|
Positive rate 12/13/2020
|
14.69%
|
12.16%
|
16.30%
|
15.23%
|
11.91%
|
17.52%
|
14.64%
|
20.82%
|
17.01%
|
|
Cases per 100k 12/13/2020
|
5644.21
|
3272.98
|
4867.49
|
4613.38
|
3394.05
|
5122.32
|
4341.82
|
8723.22
|
5398.95
|
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