Keeping track of COVID-19 in New Hampshire has been the point of this column for a year and a half, but what if the numbers we’re using to keep track aren’t accurate?
That’s the problem facing us and a lot of other COVID watchers when it comes to vaccination rates in the state, the main driver of whether the pandemic will ever stop dominating our lives.
As NHPR first reported in the summer and the state has acknowledged recently, the systems that gather information on how many vaccines of which type have been given in New Hampshire are flawed. It’s bad the Department of Health and Human Services is telling the public to use Centers for Disease Control data until it gets straightened out.
The difficulty seems to be that all data from private pharmacies isn’t being pulled into the state system because of state law requires people to have an opt-out choice for giving the information, but pharmacies don’t offer it. This is a case where bowing to a few people’s wishes has removed everybody’s freedom to make choices based on good information.
The CDC now says 78% of state residents have gotten at least one vaccine shot whereas the state was reporting just 60%, and the CDC reports a big jump in newly vaccinated people over the past month.
That’s a nice improvement, but there’s a catch. The CDC data may erroneously be counting some booster shots as first vaccines, which would explain the recent increase. It’s hard to tell exactly.
If nothing else, this snafu shows that gathering public health information is very hard. Getting lots of types of information on the fly from lots of people in lots of situations and places, with medical complexity and privacy issues added into the mix, is orders of magnitude more difficult than a lot of scientific data gathering.
But what does all this mean for the tracker? Have our conclusions been wrong?
No, I don’t think so, because we haven’t been basing this column on vaccinations, although we have been including it in our roundup.
The key for us, as I wrote back in the spring, has always been the spread of the disease as measured by hospitalizations and deaths. We also look at daily new case numbers but they depend partly on the amount of testing and reporting which means they’re squishier, so to speak. That’s why we have always used a running average taken over the previous two weeks rather than just one, which is typical. We want to smooth out any variation.
It’s possible, by the way, that New Hampshire’s hospitalization numbers are also suspect right now because some people are there despite having improved. The problem is that staffing shortfalls mean there are no open beds in long-term care facilities to take them, so they’re parked in the hospital.
But I’m afraid there’s no arguing away the number of people for whom COVID-19 caused or hastened their death, a number that has been rising lately.
In the meantime, get vaccinated and/or boosted if appropriate, and wear a mask if you’re in a crowd or indoors with strangers.
For coronavirus-related information and updates throughout the week, visit concordmonitor.com/coronavirus.
How are we doing on vaccinations? Better than I thought, but exactly how much better is unclear.
Looking at CDC data, the number of people getting vaccinated has increased by about 100,000 in the past two months, but it’s possible that at least some of those are actually fully vaccinated people getting boosters. So for the time being I’m going to assume that the very slow improvement of the summer has continued.
What’s the trend on the spread and impact of the disease? Not good.
The number of people dying with COVID-19 has doubled since the start of September. It’s now at four a day.
The number of people in the hospital has plateaued around 195 for a couple of weeks. That’s higher than it had been since the winter surge faded last February.
As for case counts, they have been around 500 since early October, which also is higher than last February, and the positive rate of tests has generally been above 5%, the point at which “community transmission” of the virus can be assumed.
As I said above, get vaccinated, get boosted, wear a mask. It ain’t over ‘til it’s over, and it’s definitely not over.
