Holiday travel led to worsening coronavirus caseload in Charlotte. Here’s what to know.
Increased socializing and travel stemming from Christmas has fueled a worsening coronavirus caseload in Charlotte and a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations.
The Mecklenburg County Public Health Department on Tuesday released the most recent data from testing. The figures give the most complete look to date on how the busy holiday season affected the spread of the virus locally.
▪ The percent of positive tests, or positivity rate, remains between 15 and 16% in the county. That number increased from around 12% just before Christmas but has not soared higher in the last week, the data show. Prior to Thanksgiving, the county had seen average positivity rates fall to less than 8%.
▪ While the percent of COVID-positive people who need to be hospitalized has not changed substantially since the start of the pandemic, the number of hospital patients is going up due to more people being infected overall.
Over the last week, an average of 521 people diagnosed with coronavirus were hospitalized in Mecklenburg, county data show. This time last month, that figure was 259 people hospitalized.
▪ The holiday demand for testing has subsided but the number of new daily cases in Mecklenburg continues to rise. According to an Observer analysis of state health figures, the seven-day average of new cases is 936. At the end of 2020, that number was 571. The volume of infections has surged since late October, when the weekly average of new cases was less than 200.
Experts say based on the incubation period of the virus, if people were exposed to COVID-19 on New Year’s Day, they would start developing symptoms now and over the coming weeks, the Observer reported earlier. Still, leaders in the response to the pandemic warn a high number of people infected are asymptomatic but can still infect others.
Vaccine supply ‘bottleneck’ complicates expanding to ages 65+ in Charlotte
Hospitalizations and deaths
On Tuesday, positive cases continued to climb statewide. There were 791 new cases in Mecklenburg County and 6,851 statewide.
Dr. David Priest, infectious disease expert with Novant Health, said Tuesday there’s been a marginal decrease in recent days to the positivity rate recorded at Novant testing sites in Charlotte and Winston-Salem. The percent of positive tests, Priest said, is still high — 22% average across those testing sites, compared to 25% on Jan. 1.
Those figures include only people tested by Novant. Nearly 4,700 tests are done per day, on average, across the county at pharmacies, drive-thru clinics, hospitals and doctor’s offices.
“It’s not a major shift, but certainly down,” Priest said of the recent positivity rate decline from Novant testing.
“We don’t know if that’s a true trend in the right direction or just a temporary change. Obviously, we hope it’s movement in the right direction and we’ve gotten over the Christmas surge, but that remains to be seen.”
Child films cops escorting angry man from Walmart in NC for refusing to wear a mask
Hospitals in Charlotte and statewide are struggling to accommodate the heightened demand — about 90% of intensive care unit beds in Mecklenburg County hospitals were occupied at the end of 2020, half of those with COVID patients, though Priest said Tuesday in a call with reporters that the hospital system doesn’t anticipate capacity issues for the next two weeks.
There have been 72,968 total cases in Mecklenburg and 652 deaths since the pandemic began.
Of 640 deaths recorded as of Jan. 10, about 550 were adults older than 60, and almost all who died were adults with underlying chronic illnesses. About half were white, mostly due to the demographics of the long-term care facilities currently experiencing an outbreak, which account for near half the deaths, health officials say.
Deaths connected to nursing homes and long-term care facilities make up a slightly lower percentage of local COVID-19 fatalities than earlier in the pandemic, an Observer analysis of county health data show.
However, of those deaths not related to long-term care facilities, 3 in 4 were among residents of color. Though the county attributes that to higher rates of underlying chronic conditions, these populations have poor access to healthcare because of systemic racism and oppression.
Locally, victims of the current second surge of coronavirus cases are more likely to be Black than reported in the summer and fall, when cases were lower.
Both in and outside of long-term care facilities like nursing homes, an increasing number of people who are dying from COVID-19 in Mecklenburg are Black — nearly 42% of all deaths, while the county’s Black population is about 33%.
