East TN information
The purpose of this is to gather information on how the covid-19 pandemic is progressing in East TN. There are good sites that have info on the pandemic generally across the US and world, but Tennessee as well as local entities put out info that is not captured by these sites.
I am mostly doing this for my own curiosity as a parent in Oak Ridge, TN; though I work in science, I don’t work in epidemiology. Thus, I’m not doing any calculations of future spread, etc. – I’m taking published datasets and plotting them. For datasets that are presented as current conditions but do not have a history, I take a copy of them (usually every six hours) to be able to plot how they change over time.
Use the menu above for information on vaccinations, conditions in schools, and more. This site was last updated on 02:44 PM on Monday September 26, 2022, though many data sources have a lag of a week or more.
As of the last time the data were updated, the 19 regional hospitals around Knoxville had only 16 ICU beds available of 317 total, based on info from the Knox County Health Department.
As of Sat, Sep 24, 2022, 27,709 people have died from covid in Tennessee.
To get a vaccine to protect others and yourself, go to https://www.vaccines.gov/.
CDC provides two different ways of summarizing covid in a community:
- Community Transmission refers to measures of the presence and spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. This is used in the blue / yellow / orange / red maps, like here.
- COVID-19 Community Levels refer to the measures of the impact of COVID-19 in terms of hospitalizations and healthcare system strain, while accounting for transmission in the community. This is used in the pastel yellow / green / orange map (red does not exist), like here.
The plot below uses color to indicate community transmission – how the disease is spreading. For the y-axis, I am showing the test positivity rate, though this is less informative as testing and reporting of tests drop off.
We can plot using the Feb 2022 guidelines from the CDC for low, medium, high community level; I’ve also recalculated past data so we can see how it would apply then. Note that though I plot case numbers, which are used by the CDC among other metrics, these might not be the most informative given the current state of testing; the hospitalization data (see tab above) could be useful.
Here are the percent of tests positive, averaged over a week.
Here are the deaths over time associated with covid in East TN (excluding Dec 22, 2021, when there seems to be an error in the state’s death records).
A high level overview of the pandemic in Tennessee as a whole (using Tennessee’s definitions of groups):
| Category | Group | Positive Covid Test | Covid Death | At Least One Vaccination | Fully Vaccinated |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Race | American Indian or Alaska Native | 1/9 | 1/1250 | ||
| Race | Asian | 1/6 | 1/1111 | 56.7% | 48.1% |
| Race | Black or African American | 1/4 | 1/263 | 43.5% | 38.3% |
| Race | Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander | 1/3 | 1/556 | ||
| Race | White | 1/4 | 1/256 | 47.1% | 42.9% |
| Ethnicity | Hispanic | 1/4 | 1/667 | 66.1% | 56% |
| Ethnicity | Not Hispanic or Latino | 1/4 | 1/263 | 56.6% | 52.1% |
| Sex | Female | 1/3 | 1/278 | 65.4% | 59.5% |
| Sex | Male | 1/3 | 1/222 | 58.2% | 52.3% |