A Mystery In Santa Clara

I kept my projections and trendlines on the data from March 11th through March 25th. The projections are a way of normalizing the new data coming in from Santa Clara’s new hospitalization dashboard. I had been excited to see where the new trendlines were going from the early April data, instead I ran into a mystery. The hospitalization numbers and the case numbers seem to be on different trajectories and there is now a mystery of at least 75 too many hospitalizations.

Case numbers should be growing faster than hospitalizations instead the opposite is happening.

I had expected to see the case numbers growing faster than hospitalizations as testing for COVID-19 ramped up and as social distancing helped to reduce the number of new infections and keep people out of the hospital. If anything, it now looks like hospitalizations are increasing at a faster rate than they were in mid-March. This is troubling.

Mystery of an additional 75 hospitalizations.

Let us assume that testing hasn’t ramped up and that the ratio of hospitalization cases to positive individuals stays the same. If that is the case, then the 172 hospitalizations on March 31st should have only grown to 212 hospitalizations on April 3rd. However as of April 3rd there were 287 hospitalizations this leaves a gap of 75 hospitalizations unexplained by the trends.

Help me out: What are the facts on the ground?

This jump could perhaps be caused by an outbreak (or outbreaks) in a vulnerable population(s). Has a nursing home in Santa Clara county gotten hard hit? Have a number of homeless gotten hospitalized recently. Trendlines and raw numbers can only go so far we need to try to account for the additional numbers and understand how to prevent a growth like this in the future.