50,000 COVID cases and counting
Experts warn of possible future spikes as state's death toll surpasses 700
As Oklahoma passed 50,000 reported infections and more than 700 deaths on Thursday, state health experts warned that the state's months-long battle against the coronavirus is far from over.
Oklahoma reported 746 new infections on Thursday, pushing the state's total to 50,669 total COVID- 19 infections since the beginning of the pandemic in March.
The new infections put Oklahoma at a 7.9% infection rate, down from its high of 13.5% in late July but still above average for the country.
Dr. Eliza Chakravarty, an epidemiologist for the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, said the problem with numbers worldwide is that the amount of infections is almost assuredly underreported.
“The trouble is we don't know how many people have it or are sick and have minimal or no symptoms at all,” she said. “There's no way to capture all those. We don't have the capacity to test everybody, and some tests are taking weeks to get results.
“There's no telling how many asymptomatic people could be walking around and spreading it.”
Chakravarty said even after months of this pandemic, the best and simplest solutions for people looking to avoid contracting the virus that has killed more than 785,000 people worldwide remains a combination of frequent hand
washing, remaining socially distant from other people and wearing a face mask.
Dr. David Kendrick of OU Medicine helps run MyHealth Access Network, which compared cities in Oklahoma that opted into mandatory masking policies to cities that did not and monitored the change in infection positivity rates over a seven-day average.
The group's data showed that in the first seven days after a mask policy went into effect, the positivity rate dropped by 0.47%. After 14 days, the positivity rate dropped by 7.57% and by 21 days it had lowered by 5.73%.
In more than a month since Oklahoma City introduced a mask mandate, Oklahoma County has seen its sevenday averages for infections fall from 213 daily infections in mid-July to 136 daily infections by mid-August.
“Based on the national literature and this early look at the data from My Health, it indicates that at least the positivity rates are declining in cities that have a policy compared to the ones who don't,” Kendrick said.
Both Kendrick and Chakravarty said the next phase in Oklahoma's fight against COVID- 19 will be determined by the return of students to schools and universities.
Kendrick said data showed huge spikes in infections following many gatherings, including a large bump in infection rates for 18-35 yearolds following Memorial Day.
From that bump, Kendrick said it was possible to watch infections rise throughout the older age groups as younger people spread it to older people and hospitalizations began to increase.
“We are entering into a very interesting phase,” Kendrick said. “As universities and schools open, we will have a whole new category of potential exposures going on.
“We had four months now without the impact of primary, secondary and university education on the possibility of transmission.
“As schools are opening, we are going to have to give that a big, hard look.”
Chakravarty said until a vaccine is available to huge swaths of the population, people will be putting their health at risk if they don't follow masking and social distancing guidelines.
Complacency and frustration could be the state's biggest obstacles in fighting the pandemic now.
“We have to acknowledge that this is driving everybody crazy,” she said. “People who believe in masks, they hate it. People who hope the virus is just going to go away magically, they hate it. Parents now have to face these choices for their kids, they hate their horrible options.
“But if we show empathy and remember that we are doing this to save each other, we can get through this.”