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 09:28 AM on Monday July 04, 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 29 ICU beds available of 317 total, based on info from the Knox County Health Department.
As of Sat, Jul 02, 2022, 26,714 people have died from covid in Tennessee.
The COVID-19 Forecast Hub makes predictions based on a number of models every week. They predict that in the week ending on Jul 09, an additional 70 people (range 19-111) will have died from covid in Tennessee, with 73 more covid deaths by Jul 16.
To get a vaccine to protect others and yourself, go to https://www.vaccines.gov/.
We can also plot using the new (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. The dashed line shows 500 new cases per 7 days per 100K people; under TN law, the governor can allow mask mandates if the level hits 1,000 cases per 14 days per 100K, so this shows the weekly average needed for this (but having 1,300 cases in one week, and none the week before, would also trigger this). All counties went well above the required threshold during the omicron wave but no masking requirements were reinstated, so this line might not be relevant in practice. 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 | 1/10 | 1/1250 | ||
Race | Asian | 1/6 | 1/1111 | 56.2% | 48.1% |
Race | Black or African American | 1/4 | 1/270 | 43.1% | 38.1% |
Race | Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander | 1/4 | 1/556 | ||
Race | White | 1/4 | 1/263 | 46.8% | 42.8% |
Ethnicity | Hispanic | 1/4 | 1/667 | 64.8% | 55.2% |
Ethnicity | Not Hispanic or Latino | 1/5 | 1/270 | 56% | 51.6% |
Sex | Female | 1/3 | 1/286 | 64.7% | 59% |
Sex | Male | 1/3 | 1/233 | 57.6% | 51.8% |