Our Webinar on the Corona Virus Numbers in Cambria County

Last Tuesday I was a panelist on a webinar explaining the coronavirus numbers in Cambria County.  Other panelists were Jill Henning, Biology Professor at Pitt-Johnstown and Tulsi Shrivastava, a local data scientist.  You can view the slides for the presentation below.  It lasts for 40 minutes.  As of that panel, the county ranked 7th in the state in cases per 100,000, 8th in case mortality (# of deaths/# of deaths), 10th in testing rate, 15th in hospitalizations, 4th in deaths/100,000, 4th in patients on a ventilator/100,000, and 8th in full vaccinations/100,000.

 

Since then the numbers have changed.  The county now ranks 8th in the state in cases/100,000 at 8,346.  It still ranks 8th in the state in cases mortality at 3.37%.  It now ranks 11th in the state in testing at 38.17%, 10th in the state in hospitalizations at 32.26/100,000, 5th in deaths at 281.12/100,000, 5th in patients on a ventilator at 5.38/100,000, and 11th in full vaccinations at 2,290/100,000.  Recent numbers have been encouraging but we can't let our guard down.

On of the sponsors on the webinar was the Tribune Democrat.  Chip Minemyer, their editor moderated the panel.  The post of the Tribune-Democrat's article received 13 likes and 10 haha's.  Here is a smattering of comments it received on Facebook. 

"it all depends on how the numbers are collected. I have come to the conclusion that it's best not to believe stats."  (liked by 3)

"More propaganda from this site. Terrible." Liked by 5, laughed at by 1, and wowed by 1.

"And if you want it changed to the actual cause do you have to go to court to get it changed?" liked by 1.

"I’ve not seen cycle threshold values reported anywhere. Are those available with local Covid tests?" Liked by none.

"Depends on who inputs the numbers." liked by 2.

"Lol the numbers are wrong, What makes them a expert at a new virus? These people are part of the problem! I know a few people who past with in the past few months and none of them had covid but they mark their death as covid..."  Liked by 5, laughed at by 4, wowed by one.

"like you can trust the trib......lol......" Laughed at by one.

"Numbers do lie when a person with an agenda is on the other end.

Like the crooks in Tom Wolfs administration." Liked by 3, laughed at by one.

 "Why does the The Tribune-Democrat print letters advocating the murder of 74 million people?"

 Laughed at by one.

"As a native of the area, I'm pleased that the Tribune Democrat is still a real newspaper. Bravo!" Liked by 6 laughed at by 3.

"Sounds great if the numbers were 100% accurate" liked by none

" Unless the the people responsible for entering data are compromised" Liked by 4.

Some people may think me sadistic for even looking at these comments  but it does give clues to the thinking of those who In This Together Needs to reach.  I'd love to know how many of them actually read the article.

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On Tuesday, January 19, In This Together: Cambria County had a beautiful candle light vigil on the river wall by the stone bridge in Johnstown.  There was one candle for each of the 340 people who died from the corona virus in Cambria County since the pandemic began as of that day.  There have been 14 deaths in the county since then as of this writing.

In This Together: Cambria was organized as a response to the skyrocketing case and death rate in the county.  They have partnered with The Tribune-Democrat, the 1889 Foundation, Conemaugh Health System, and others.  They have held online events to inform the public on COVID-19 and vaccines and a spiritual prayer service for the holidays.

The next online event that In This Together will be having will be this coming Tuesday, January 26 at 7PM.  It is titled COVID Questions: By the Numbers.  I will be presenting the data that I have collected from Johns-Hopkins online dashboard, from the Pennsylvania Department of Health, and from other sources.  Chip Minemyer, editor of the Tribune Democrat, will be Dr. Jill Henning, PhD will present on the biology of the Coronavirus.  Tulsi Shrivastava will include will be stories of victims of the pandemic to show the human side of the pandemic in the county.  The event will be livestreamed on Zoom at https://pitt.zoom.us/j/94911790258 and at the In This Together Facebook page.  You will be able to ask questions of the other panelists and I.  The taped event will be available on YouTube.  Up coming events will be:

• February 9: Mental Health
• February 23: Specialists Forum
• March 9: Local Leaders
• March 23: Economic Impact
• April 6: Education

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Testing and New Cases Declined in Cambria County While The Positive Test Rate Remains High

The graph above shows how the rise in cases appears to be levelling off in Cambria County since Donald Trump came here on October 13. The 7 day average for new cases reached a high of 214.29 on Dec 11 and has steadily decreased to 96.57 on Dec 25 (a 54.7% decrease) as can be seen in the solid black line in the graph below.

Also in the graph above we see that the 7 day average number of test results presented per day in the county (dotted red line in the graph) also decreased from 335 per day on Dec 11 and also decreased to 182 per day on Dec 25, a decrease of 45.7% over the same period.  This is a 9% smaller rate of decrease than that of cases in the county.

This graph above shows how the cumulative positive testing rates for the county (dotted blue line), Pennsylvania (red line), and the U.S. (yellow line).  The 7 day average for positive tests peaked at 68.29% on Dec 8 to 53.14% on Dec 25.  This is only a 22.2% decrease which is smaller than the decrease in cases and testing.  

On December 13 I posted on how the % of test results (46.8% today) for Greater Johnstown (zip codes 15901 thru 15909) was higher than the % of positive cases there (41.1% today).  This suggests that the cumulative testing rate for Johnstown is 31.48% while it is 35.74% for the rest of the county, a 13.53% increase outside of Johnstown.  The cumulative positive testing rate is 16.71% for Greater Johnstown while for the rest of the county it is 21.15%, a 26.54% increase.

While it is encouraging to watch the number of new positive cases decrease in Cambria County, the smaller decrease in the positive cases suggests that there may be more cases that are being missed, especially outside of Greater Johnstown.  The 7 day average for deaths in the county peaked at 8.14 per day on December 17 and decreased to 5 per day this Christmas day.  The peak in deaths came 6 days after the peak in cases in the county.  Lets hope the trend continues.  The Governor's order against dine in restaurant eating and gym us appears to be curtailing the rise in cases.  I wish I had better news this Christmas night.

**Update**

Dave Sutor of the Tribune Democrat has tweeted that Conemaugh Memorial hospital has rented refrigerator trailers to handle possible over crowding at the morgue.

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Testing Rates are Higher in Johnstown but There Are More Cases of COVID-19 in the Rest of Cambria County

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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Joe Biden won Johnstown by 80 votes

Four years ago Donald Trump won Cambria County with 66.8% of the vote.  This year he won the county with 67.9%.  Many observers were shocked that he won by such a large margin.  However when one looks at individual precincts a more complex pattern can emerge.  

In 2017, looked at the precinct data for Johnstown and found that Hillary Clinton won the 20 precincts of the city by 83 votes.  This year I took another look at the precincts in the city and found that Biden won the city again by 80 votes.

Ward	Biden		Trump		Other		Diff	Total
	N	%	N	%	N	%
Cambria City	81	46.6%	86	49.4%	7	4.0%	-5	174
Center Town	230	58.2%	159	40.3%	6	1.5%	71	395
18th ward	140	39.1%	207	57.8%	11	3.1%	-67	358
8th ward 1	172	48.9%	173	49.1%	7	2.0%	-1	352
8th ward 3	353	41.2%	485	56.7%	18	2.1%	-132	856
Kernville	150	58.1%	105	40.7%	3	1.2%	45	258
19th ward	208	45.8%	235	51.8%	11	2.4%	-27	454
Old Conemaugh	250	53.8%	208	44.7%	7	1.5%	42	465
Prospect	161	78.9%	42	20.6%	1	0.5%	119	204
7th ward	348	60.1%	224	38.7%	7	1.2%	124	579
21st ward	110	37.2%	183	61.8%	3	1.0%	-73	296
17th ward 1	232	57.1%	169	41.6%	5	1.2%	63	406
17th ward 2	242	48.8%	246	49.6%	8	1.6%	-4	496
17th ward 3	183	46.0%	209	52.5%	6	1.5%	-26	398
17th ward 4	113	44.1%	139	54.3%	4	1.6%	-26	256
20th ward 1	270	43.9%	337	54.8%	8	1.3%	-67	615
20th Ward 2	259	54.0%	215	44.8%	6	1.3%	44	480
Total	3,502	49.7%	3,422	48.6%	118	1.7%	80	7,042

This year there were 17 precincts in the city whereas there were 20 in the city four years ago.  Biden won 7 out of the 17 precincts (highlighted in yellow).  Hillary Clinton won 11 of the 20 precincts.  

When the votes are totaled across the city, Biden won the city by 80 votes out of the 7,042 cast or 1.1%.  This margin is slightly smaller than the margin that Clinton won by (83 out of 6,438 cast or 1.3%).  Biden largest margin was in the seventh ward in terms of the number of votes (124) while for Trump it was in 8th ward number three (132).  Clinton likewise won the 7th ward at 166 while Percentagewise, Biden's best result was in Prospect at 78.9% (it was for Clinton as well at 82.1%) while for Trump it was in the 21st ward at 61.8% (in 2016 he won the 21st with 61.5%).  

There were 118 (1,7% of the total) third party and write ins in the city this year while in 2016 there were 281 in the city (4.4% of the total).  In 2016 there were three third party candidates on the ballot (Green, Constitutional, Libertarian).  This year there was one (Libertarian).

Six hundred and four more people voted this year than in 2016.  The margins in the Trump precincts were closer than in Biden's. The large margins in Biden's precincts were large enough to offset those in the more numerous precincts for Trump.  This city is just as divided as the nation.

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