St. Charles County is seeing the most rapid growth in new COVID-19 cases, according to a map of new cases by zip code produced by the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force.
Three zip codes — 63385, 63366, 63376 — saw the biggest change in new cases since last week, which includes St. Peters, Wentzville and O’Fallon.
Several zip codes in South St. Louis and West St. Louis County also saw rapid growth: 63109, 63116, 63119, 63122, 63131 and 63017. These include Frontenac, Chesterfield, Kirkwood, Carondelet, Bevo and Webster Groves.
Overall, the 14 counties in the Task Force’s statistical area are all seeing an uptick in new cases.
“It doesn’t matter if you are in an urban or rural area or one of the suburban areas, they’re all seeing an uptick, except in those low-populated areas on the Illinois side,” said Dr. Alex Garza, incident commander of the task force during his July 20 briefing. “And that’s concerning because that means we have transmission going on widespread throughout the statistical area.”
Garza shared the hospital data as part of his regular press briefings for the task force, which makes up the region’s four largest healthcare systems: SSM Health, BJC HealthCare, Mercy and St. Luke’s Hospital. These systems represent 2.8 million people for an area that includes surrounding counties in Missouri and Illinois.
Garza showed a model predicting where the region’s hospitalizations could be heading. The region is now trending towards the “upper limit” trend line, which shows a stark increase in hospitalizations by the middle of August — that could surpass the region’s peak in mid-April.
“It’s concerning,” Garza said. “But it doesn’t account for having a mask policy. This was instituted a little over two weeks ago. So we’ll be looking at our data going forward to see if we have any benefit from that.”
It was not instituted “uniformly” throughout the metro area, Garza said, so the task force is going to compare the data based on the masking policies for each area.
Garza also showed a model of people in the intensive care units. That trend line does not seem to be shooting up like the overall hospitalizations.
“We have seen improved numbers in our ICU and in our mortality, and we attribute that to better treatments within our hospitals,” Garza said. “We’ve done better at treating people with COVID since the beginning of the pandemic.”
On July 20, new hospital admissions (data lagged two days) increased — from 35 yesterday to 38 today. It’s “very concerning” that we are getting close to 40 new hospital patients a day, Garza said.
The task force uses a “seven-day moving average” to look at new hospital admissions because it shows the overall trend. On July 20, Garza said the average is 34, which is the highest that it’s been since the beginning of May. On July 8, it was 21.
The seven-day average for people currently hospitalized for COVID-19 has also increased to 228. That number was 145 on July 3, and 139 on July 1.
However this doesn’t include the number of inpatients who are waiting for test results. Inpatients who have tested positive increased — from 238 yesterday to 260 today. Inpatient awaiting test results increased — from 132 yesterday to 176 today. Combined that’s 436 people in the hospitals who have either tested positive or are awaiting test results — the highest it’s been since mid-May.
The number of confirmed COVID positive patients in the ICUs increased — from 55 yesterday to 58 today. The number of confirmed COVID positive patients on ventilators increased — from 27 yesterday to 31 today.
Across the system hospitals, 20 COVID-19 patients were discharged yesterday, bringing the cumulative number of COVID-19 patients discharged to 3,429.
Today, reporters asked Garza about schools opening, seeing as the hospitalization numbers could be where the region was in April by the middle of August.
“The school in and of itself is not just composed of children,” Garza said. “It’s composed of many people, support people, bus drivers, people who work in the cafeteria, all of them. And anytime you have an increase in virus in the community and you’re bringing people into a constrained environment for long periods of time, you’re increasing our risk of transmission.”
The answer to the school problem is to decrease the spread in the community, he said.
“We’ll get to a point where we won’t be able to catch up,” Garza said. “We don’t want to lose those things that we’ve gained. We want our kids to be back in school. But we want them to be back in a safe environment. We need to turn these numbers around. We can’t do it with just part of the population. We need everyone.”
