Staff Contact: Mat Reidhead or Jackie Gatz
The week ending on Christmas Day marked the third consecutive week with reduced growth in new COVID-19 cases in Missouri. During November, more than 120,000 Missourians contracted the virus. Conversely, during the first 27 days of December, just more than 69,000 new cases were recorded in the state — a 38% decrease compared to the first 27 days in November, which was the worst month for the state in terms of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
Unfortunately, the continued decline in COVID-19 activity is not distributed uniformly across Missouri’s communities. Evaluating new cases, positivity rates and demand for testing reveals extreme variation in community spread across counties in the state. Last week, the range of new cases in each county was 443 per 100,000 residents in Crawford County to just 25 new cases per 100,000 in Knox County. This 18-fold difference may be explained in part by demand for testing, of which only nine were administered to residents of Knox County last week. However, demand for testing typically is driven by symptomatic populations or contact with COVID-19-positive individuals.
Testing positivity rates also varied widely last week with just 7% of nearly 200 tests administered in Cedar County returning a positive result, while 42% of 126 tests taken in Vernon County were positive — a six-fold difference for neighboring counties. The continued elevated activity moves in and out of communities at disrupted intervals, underscoring the imperative of continued masking, physical distancing and hand hygiene during the remainder of the holiday season in Missouri.