UPDATE: While Johns Hopkins is reporting a 55.2% COVID-19 positivity rate for the past week as of Thursday, Wyoming Department of Health spokesperson Kim Deti says that rate is not consistent with WDH data. The WDH shows a rolling 14-day positive test rate of 8.22% as of Oct. 23.
For Oct. 24, the WDH report that 20.72% of tests came back positive. This story has been updated to include WDH data compared with the Johns Hopkins data.
CASPER, Wyo. — The Wyoming Department of Health (WDH) report that a record 109 COVID-19 patients were hospitalized across the state as of Thursday, Oct. 29. Wyoming saw more than 100 patients hospitalized due to COVID for the first time on Sunday.
Wyoming continues to see COVID-19 spread faster than any other state in the country, based on the “effective reproduction rate” of the virus. Wyoming’s effective reproduction rate has increased to 1.34, up from 1.29 on Tuesday, according to rt.live who track how fast COVID-19 is spreading in each state.
“Rt represents the effective reproduction rate of the virus calculated for each locale,” rt.live explains. “It lets us estimate how many secondary infections are likely to occur from a single infection in a specific area. Values over 1.0 mean we should expect more cases in that area, values under 1.0 mean we should expect fewer.”
Wyoming’s Rt rate of 1.34 matches the rate in Vermont. All but two states have an effective reproduction rate of the virus above 1.0.
Wyoming has seen 2,298 new confirmed and probable cases of COVID-19 in the past week, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The positive test rate has spiked to 55.21% with 4,162 tests completed in the past week, according to Johns Hopkins. That is a jump from the 30.52% positivity rate reported Tuesday.
However, Wyoming Department of Health Public Information Officer Kim Deti said Thursday that Johns Hopkins data is inconsistent with WDH data. The WDH shows a rolling 14-day positive test rate of 8.22% as of Oct. 23.
For Oct. 24, the WDH report that 20.72% of tests came back positive. This story has been updated to include WDH data compared with the Johns Hopkins data.
Johns Hopkins notes that there are multiple ways to calculate the positivity rate.
“In the U.S., there are no federal standards for reporting COVID-19 testing data,” Johns Hopkins says. “This makes it impossible to offer a fully apples-to-apples view of testing data at the national level. Without federal standards, states have been left to forge their own paths, and as a result, they report testing data differently.”
“In light of these inconsistencies, our source for testing data, The Covid Tracking Project (CTP), is changing how it maps states’ data to the categories we use for our positivity calculations.”
Both the COVID Tracking Project and Johns Hopkins note that states have not always been consistent in how they report testing data.
“States are not consistent in how and when they release and update their data, and some may even retroactively change the numbers they report,” the WDH said. “This can affect the percentages you see presented in these data visualizations. We are taking steps to account for these irregularities in how we present the information, but it is important to understand the full context behind these data.”
The COVID Tracking Project note changes in how the WDH has reported COVID testing and other data throughout the pandemic:
On October 14, 2020, Wyoming’s Total PCR Tests (specimens) and Total PCR Tests (people) values both decreased by over 1000 with no explanation. We believe the state might have deduplicated its data.
On August 26, 2020, Wyoming did not report Total PCR tests (people). We have carried over the previous day’s value.
On June 19, 2020, Wyoming began reporting Total PCR tests (people) as well as Total PCR tests (specimens).
On April 22, 2020, Wyoming revised its Total PCR tests (specimens) downward, resulting in a corresponding decrease in the calculated value of Negative PCR tests (specimens).
During the week of April 7, 2020, Wyoming began to report both confirmed and probable cases in its Recovered metrics.
During the week of April 6, 2020, Wyoming began reporting confirmed and probable cases separately. COVID Tracking Project
Johns Hopkins say they use the following method to determine the positivity rate: “The number of people who test positive is divided by either unique people, encounters, or tests (depending on availability – each variable can help indicate the number of people tested).”
While the positivity rate reported by the WDH and Johns Hopkins don’t match, other raw data reported by both matches.
The number of total confirmed and probable cases in Wyoming through Thursday stands at 12,146, according to Johns Hopkins, which matches the total reported by the Wyoming Department of Health.
16 new COVID-19 related deaths have been reported in the past week. Wyoming has seen 77 total COVID-19 related deaths during the pandemic.
Rt.live also uses data from The COVID Tracking Project, an initiative of The Atlantic Monthly Group to calculate the effective reproduction rate for each state. The COVID Tracking Project’s raw data for Wyoming is consistent with data provided by the Wyoming Department of Health.
COVID hospitalizations have sharply increased throughout the month of October. There were 27 COVID patients in Wyoming hospitals as of Oct. 1, according to the WDH.
As of Thursday, 56 of 122 available adult intensive care unit beds across the state were occupied by COVID or other patients, according to the WDH data.
Hospitals self-report such data to the WDH. Hospitals may have the ability to offer ICU-level care to more patients than are listed on the WDH’s COVID-19 Wyoming Hospital Capacity site, as is the case with the Wyoming Medical Center.
WMC interim CEO Dr. James Bleicher said on Monday that the 14 ICU beds available at the WMC as listed by the WDH refers to the hospital’s standard ICU unit. The WMC has a special COVID unit which is able to offer either expanded ICU-level care or more beds generally depending on the severity of the illnesses of the patients the WMC is seeing.
According to the WDH data on Thursday, two of the WMC’s standard 14 ICU beds were unoccupied.
While the WMC, like other hospitals, has been seeing record numbers of patients and expect to see those numbers continue to trend upward, Bleicher said on Monday that the WMC had been securing traveling nurses and were working to ensure the hospital could accommodate and additional 30-40 patients.
However, with the virus continuing the spread in most states, hospitals across the country could find themselves increasingly struggling to find staff needed to accommodate a growing number of COVID patients in coming weeks and months.
“Nurses will also become harder to come by as we get further in the winter, as all these other states are using every resource they have,” Bleicher said Monday. “When it is [surging across] the whole country, nobody is going to have extra resources.”
20 out of a total 182 ventilators, which are sometimes used to treat COVID patients, were in use in Wyoming hospitals across the state on Thursday, according to the WDH.
Since hospitals self-report data to the WDH, State Health Officer Dr. Alexia Harrist has said that the WDH data about hospital resources and COVID-19 hospitalizations is best used to track trends in overall COVID hospitalizations or resource availability.
Harrist has said that the data should be considered an approximation of the exact numbers since hospitals self-report the data and the actual statewide numbers could vary slightly.
The Wyoming Department of Health provide data about the number of COVID patients in specific hospitals in the state, but caution that the data is self-reported by hospitals and that “non-general acute hospitals (e.g., rehabilitation hospitals) may report COVID-19 hospitalizations but these data do not always reflect statewide capacity issues.”
Further data from the WDH is available below:
