WASHINGTON — It’s Tuesday, December 8, and for the first time the District of Columbia is releasing data on the activities that may be leading to new cases of the coronavirus in the city.
On Monday, Dr. LaQuandra Nesbitt, director of the District of Columbia Department of Health, said her agency would begin publishing weekly data about exposure activities on the city’s coronavirus portal. The data reflects the percentage of people who’ve contracted COVID-19 who said they participated in certain activities deemed “high-risk” in the two weeks prior to developing symptoms.
The first batch of data, posted Monday, shows that a shockingly high number of people are still participating in social events – nearly a quarter of all contact tracing respondents said they’d attended one in the two weeks before they got sick.
Interestingly, while Mayor Muriel Bowser announced new restrictions on youth sports on Monday, very few people reported participating in sports or going to the gym or a fitness class in the weeks prior to contracting coronavirus.
In case you’re in a hurry and just looking for the numbers, here’s how things look today:
- D.C. reported 270 new cases of the coronavirus on Tuesday, bringing its seven-day average to 272 cases. That’s the city’s highest infection rate to-date.
- Maryland reported 2,632 new cases of the coronavirus and 50 new deaths on Tuesday – the state’s highest single-day death count since May.
- Virginia reported 3,860 new cases and 52 new deaths from the coronavirus on Tuesday. That’s just 20 cases below the commonwealth’s single-day high, and Virginia’s highest death count since September. It also pushes Virginia’s seven-day average to 3,238 cases – its highest point ever.
How are things in the DMV?
In Maryland, after a slight decline over the weekend hospitalization numbers jumped back upward by nearly 100 cases on Tuesday. There are now 1,653 people hospitalized for treatment of COVID-19 in the state – just 58 patients below the state’s all-time high.
Within the last month, the state has also seen a significant rise in the number of coronavirus cases in children ages 0 to 9. For most of the pandemic, that age group had avoided significant infections. However, as cases continue setting new records across the state, Maryland has reported 100+ new cases among kids under 10 for six days straight – the longest such record. On Friday alone the state reported just under 200 new cases in that age group. The state also reported the first death of a child under the age of 10 – a 1-year-old – in the entire DMV last week.
In Virginia, the commonwealth’s testing capacity continues to show signs that it’s overwhelmed. The commonwealth has now averaged a testing positivity of more than 10% for over a week. As of Tuesday, its seven-day average had hit 10.9% -- up more than four percentage points from where it was a month earlier.