Iron and Washington Counties Update

Iron County: numbers are starting to get scary.

Washington County: still getting worse.

BTW: I went to Walmart in Cedar City this afternoon. I've been counting masks on customers on recent trips, and it got as low as 6 in the whole store a few weeks ago. Today the store was very busy, and I lost track of the number of people wearing masks in the high double-digits.

This first chart shows Iron County. The data on the vertical axis is logged: if cases are "exploding" the data should be an upward sloping straight line on the right hand side. It isn't. It's worse than exploding.

That isn't supposed to happen on a graph like this: a non-technical explanation for taking logs is that it gets rid of that upward curvature that people call explosive. It couldn't correct for that because the growth is faster than explosive; I know that doesn't sound like it makes sense, but those are the best words I have for the current situation.

I'm speculating, but I think it means that there are more sick people out there than we realize, and they are finally getting tested. An epidemic, by itself, shouldn't show growth like this. There must be a human factor involved.

And in Iron County, days to double continues to plummet. It's easy to say "oh, we're just getting back to where we were two months ago", but the thing is back then we were going from 6 to 13 cases in a week. Now we have 7 times that many tests coming back positive each day.

I stand by what I wrote a few days ago: the hospital in Iron County is going to be in trouble when we get up to about 75 cases in a week. We're up to 46 in a week now. We had ten the week before that.

For Washington County, the top chart shows that it never got to flat.

The roughly constant slope on the right hand side indicates steady growth rates. However, since those are rates, and they compound, that means the number of positive cases is continuing to rise and new cases are getting larger every day.

The bottom chart shows that days to double is still inching upwards. This is a good sign.

But, of course, Washington County is still worse off than on May 1 when things started re-opening.