COVID -- Better Testing, Better Treatment -- By The Numbers

 There are three states that tell the tale of COVID in the USA.  Connecticut, Oregon and Oklahoma all have approximately the same number of people.  In Oklahoma, there have been 68,000 confirmed cases, Connecticut had 54,000 cases and Oregon had 28,000.  The number of people dying in each state from the virus, though, was CT - 4480, OK - 888 and OR - 499.  Why are the differences so striking?  Why could Oklahoma have about 25% more cases than Connecticut but only about 20% as many deaths.  If things were equal in both states, the Oklahoma case numbers should have resulted in 5500 deaths using the same mortality rate as Connecticut, but there were only 888 deaths.

The answer seems to come from two sources:  better testing finding more cases and better treatments resulting in better outcomes.

First let's look at testing.  The bulk of the CT cases were in the early days of the pandemic before the full testing apparatus was up and running.  A great many people with no or few symptoms were never tested.  Oklahoma's big case load came recently.  At that point, testing for everyone was easily available.  That means that many of the no or mild symptom case were picked up.  That explains why OK had so many more cases in the same size population.

Then there's better treatments.  CT had over 11,000 people hospitalized with the virus, and 4500 died.  OK had over 5000 hospitalized with the virus and 888 died.  That means that over 40% of those hospitalized in CT died while less than 20% of those hospitalized in OK died.  Obviously, these are rough numbers because not everyone who died was first hospitalized.  In general, though, people dying made it to hospitals first.  Since the cases in CT were bunched in the early days of the pandemic and those in OK have been much more recent, it would seem that better treatments for the virus has led to better outcomes for the hospitalized patients.