As I live and work in Northern Virginia, just a few miles outside of Washington, DC, the local situation is of interest to me, as I suspect it is to a few other readers. I will be maintaining these updates on Wednesdays for a while. Again, all the data is from the Johns Hopkin’s website (which I gather is also maintained in the DC area), as of 11:32:33 AM: Johns Hopkins CSSE
The DC area is rather sprawling, with over 5 million people scattered across DC, Virginia and Maryland. Let me list the presence of virus by location. I list the number of cases from last week followed by the number of cases this week and then the current number of reported deaths. Population is the 2018 estimate from Wikipedia:
……………………….….Population…last week…this week.…Deaths
Washington D.C…………..702,445…..7,551………8,406…..….445
Arlington, VA…………..…..237,521…..1,728………1,988………109
Alexandria VA………….…160,530……1,577………1,824………..42
Fairfax County, VA……..1,150,795……8,163…….10,069………364
Falls Church, VA……..…….14,772………..44………….53………….8
Fairfax City, VA……..………24,574…….…47……..……59…………4
Loudoun County, VA………406,850……1,579………2,274………..53
Prince Williams C., VA….…468,011……4,054……..5,074……..…99
Manassas…………………….41,641…..…699…………966………..10
Manassas Park………….…..17,307………207…………280…….…..6
Stafford Country, VA………149,960………514…………657…….….4
Fredericksburg, VA…….…..29,144…….…101…………136…….….0
Montgomery C., MD….…1,052,567….…9,052……..10,467……..572
Prince Georges C., MD….909,308…….12,446………14,100…….520
Total……….…….…….…5,365,425……47,762………56,353…..2,236
The number of cases was doubling at every locale each week for the first three weeks I was tracking this. The rate of decreased, but primarily because the denominator got large. So it went to 58% increase, then 50%, then 39%, then 27% and last week only increased by 24%. This week the increase was only 18% but the actual number of cases went up 8,591. It has been in the that range for a while (9,301 new cases last week, 8,200 new cases the week before that and 8,547 new cases three weeks ago). This is still not under control.
The Mortality Rate for the area is 3.97%, which is high. It either means lots of vulnerable people, or the number of cases of infection are being significantly underreported. The population known to be infected is 1.05%. or one confirmed case for every 95 people. It may be that over 2% of the area has been infected.
The governor of Virginia (who is actually a medical doctor) extended the shut-down in Northern Virginia until 29 May. Certainly still needed and suspect he will need to extend it further. He gave a list of locales that were under that order, and it included every place mentioned above except Fredericksburg.
The Washington DC statistic area according to some also includes Warren, Clarke, Fauquier, and Spotsylvania Counties in Virginia, Jefferson County in West Virginia, Frederick, Howard, Charles and Calvert Counties in Maryland. I rarely go to these places and they were not listed in the Governor of Virginia’s order extending the lock-down in Northern Virginia. Of interest to me is Albemarle County, VA with 168 confirmed cases (142 last week) and 8 deaths, and Charlottesville, VA which has 97 confirmed cases (72 last week) and 3 deaths. Montgomery County, VA is unchanged with 70 cases this week (66 last week) and 1 death. Of course, who know what will happen if you bring in tens of thousands of students in the fall. These two areas are the home of UVA and Virginia Tech, two large universities located in a more rural environment. They are in the part of Virginia where restrictions have been relaxed.
