COVID patient dashboard includes vaccination status

The Tower Health COVID-19 dashboard has been updated to reflect the vaccination status of the patients.

Tower joins the Penn State Health network in adding that to its information accessible to the public.

On Wednesday, the Tower dashboard showed 40 patients in Reading Hospital with 33 unvaccinated and seven vaccinated. There were four in intensive care, all unvaccinated.

The dashboard also recorded 10 discharges and no deaths. It wasn’t updated Tuesday so it’s unclear if that is a one- or twoday total.

Federal and state health authorities consider vaccinated to mean two weeks beyond the final shot, whether the two-dose Pfizer or Moderna products or the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

Reading Hospital has 40 of the 78 COVID patients in the Tower system, the dashboard showed.

In the Pennsylvania Department of Health dashboard update Wednesday, COVID hospitalizations in Berks County were the same at 67, and there were also still seven in intensive care.

For the state overall, it was the second day of increases, 40 more patients for a total of 2,838, after several days of declines. The number in the ICU dropped 18 to 663.

Cases

Berks added 128 COVID cases in the Wednesday update of the dashboard, a little better showing than a week earlier when a string of lower case days ended abruptly with a 151.

The pandemic total of cases reached 58,309.

Each case is a new person testing positive. The dashboard update is the COVID statistics for the previous day, in this case Tuesday.

The seven-day case average for Berks was 131, and the 14-day was 130.

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania overall added 4,178 cases, maintaining a two-week run of sub-5,000-case days, and the pandemic total was nearly 1.55 million.

About 15 of the worst days of the delta surge were over 5,000 cases. It’s been nearly two weeks since the 5,000 threshold was reached by a daily total.

Berks had 3.1% of the state’s cases reported Wednesday. Berks has 3.3% of the state population.

Since the delta test-processing peak of 67,000 on Oct. 2, the number of tests conducted daily has been careening from the 40,000 to 60,000 range with a few stops between.

Vaccinations

There was another update of the vaccinations totals by the state health department in the Wednesday dashboard.

The health department’s comment: “Pennsylvania’s vaccine dashboard was updated today to more accurately reflect the number of people who are partially and fully vaccinated and account for the additional doses administered to residents in each county outside of Philadelphia. Demographic data associated with the vaccinations was also updated. The updates are part of the department’s continuous work to improve the quality of data and statistical reporting to ensure the public has the most accurate and up-to-date information.”

In practice it means that duplications were eliminated and misclassifications were ironed out. The numbers were not as significant as the adjustment made July 9.

In Berks, the number of completed vaccinations declined by 332 to 212,056, a feat that would not be possible unless there had been record-keeping problems.

The partials column took a big hit, down 1,727 to 20,795.

The third shot/booster category increased by 1,498 to 12,744.

Across the state, the completed column increased by about 3,000 to more than 6.43 million.

The partials column took the largest hit since July 9, dropping by nearly 39,000 to 743,096.

Third shot/boosters soared by more than 56,000 to 560,907.

The partials column lost nearly 600,000 in the July 9 statistical cleanup.

The CDC picture on vaccinations shows Berks with a total of 233,561 residents fully vaccinated. The CDC runs a day behind the state, and the quality controlling should show up in the Thursday update.

The CDC said that in Berks about the fully vaccinated:

• 64.7% of those age 12 and older

• 67.0% of those age 18 and older

• 87.8% of those age 65 and older.

The national averages for those age group segments are 67.2%, 69% and 84.7%, respectively.

National picture

The weekend slowdown of data processing is more pronounced at the national level with the CDC statistics.

By Wednesday the catchup is nearly complete.

The seven-day average of cases was down to 65,953, continuing the downward trend from a delta peak of 161,749 on Sept. 1.

The seven-day average of deaths was down to 1,159, continuing the downward trend from a delta peak of 1,844 on Sept. 15.

Surges ramp up with cases followed by hospitalizations and deaths and unwind that way as well.