April 14, 2020

We hear it every day. “Social distancing is working. We’re flattening the curve!”

We’ve been keeping a spreadsheet with all the Monroe County coronavirus case and testing data that the Florida Department of Health provides each day. It’s now been 26 days since the first COVID-19 case was officially reported in the Keys (on March 20th). The total count is now 64 cases. We were curious to see what those numbers would look like when we plugged them into graphs. What does “our curve” look like?  Is it indeed flattening as a result of all our efforts at social distancing?

Keep in mind as you look at the charts below that in other hard hit areas numbers of cases have doubled in 1-3 days. That’s a daily rate of increase of 33% to 100%. (New York) (Italy) . In Monroe County the case count is currently taking well over a week to double. The rate of daily increase in the number of cases was down to just 3% on Monday the 13th. No cases were reported on April 14th, although we might see some documented in FDOH’s April 15th morning report. Let’s hope this trend continues.

(Note: We used the dates that FDOH actually entered cases into their database – as shown on their twice daily reports – which is not necessarily the same date that new cases were reported to the public. There are times when test results come to FDOH after they have completed their nightly 5:00 pm update. In which case the public documents do not reflect those new cases until the next day; usually the next morning.

The following graphs show data from Day 1 (March 20) through April 18th) 

(The graphs have been updated using data through April 18th.)

Note: These graphs were put together by The Blue Paper. The graphs are not “official” or “government approved.” Although we have spent many hours tracking the data and creating these graphs and have done our best to make them accurate and we believe they are accurate, it is possible that there may have been an inadvertent error when transferring the data. If you find any mistakes please let us know so that we can correct immediately.

We have added a graph showing the overall percentage of patients who are listed as cases by FDOH for Monroe County and who have at some point during their illness been hospitalized. This is very limited information. We are not provided daily information about the number of patients who have been discharged or the number of patients currently hospitalized. We do know that overall 3 of the 9 patients who have been hospitalized have died and that at least 4 have been discharged. We do not have information about the level of care required for patients such as how many were in ICU and how many needed intubation and mechanical ventilation. There are likely 2 patients currently hospitalized in Monroe County. (4/18/20))