The Thursday, April 23 data from the Snohomish Health District continues a mixed report card on the progress in the local battle with COVID-19. On the downside, new cases are up, with 50 added to the ranks of confirmed COVID patients since Wednesday (yellow bar chart). Also continuing to trend upward are the number of active cases in the county (red bar chart), now standing at 812 currently sick with the virus. As of Thursday, 2,436 Snohomish County residents have contracted the virus over the reporting period (upper line, countywide and city line charts).
On the positive side, numbers hospitalized patients (purple bar chart) remain relatively low at 53, with no new hospitalizations since Wednesday. This data pattern suggests that the new and active cases are not severe enough or far enough progressed to warrant hospitalization. Therefore, despite these numbers being up we can infer that these represent people who for the present are able to ride out the virus in a home environment and not require intubation, ventilation and other measures available only in hospitals.
The numbers of people who have successfully recovered from the illness (green bar chart) has been relatively flat since April 16, the same point when the numbers of active cases (red bar chart) began to climb. This could suggest several things, among them that criteria for determining who has and has not recovered have changed, testing of patients to certify recovery has been less rigorous, or simply that fully recovering from the virus is becoming increasingly difficult for patients.
Perhaps the best news is that for the second day in a row, no new deaths from COVID-19 (grey bar chart) have been reported in Snohomish County. In viewing the number of deaths over the reporting period, bear in mind that these overwhelmingly represent individuals who contracted the disease many weeks ago before social distancing and other measures were fully implemented. Using Health District figures as a basis for calculation, the death rate stands at 4.1 percent among COVID-19 cases in Snohomish County over the full reporting period.
The local numbers for April 23, 2020:
— By Larry Vogel
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