Over the past few days we asked hospitals, look at just those new cases who are coming in. Yesterday, 600 new cases. Where are those people coming from and what can we learn from those people to further target and refine our strategy?
They are primarily coming from downstate New York, which is not surprising. When you look at the racial breakdown of who’s getting hospitalized, you see it’s disproportionately African American and Latino. Higher percentage male, 52-48. A very high percentage comorbidities.
This is a surprise. Overwhelmingly, the people were at home. 18% of the people came from nursing homes, less than 1% came from jail or prison, 2% came from the homeless population, 2% from other congregate facilities, but 66% of the people were at home, which is shocking to us. Disproportionately older, but by the way, older starts at 51 years old. Old is now 51 and up. 60 to 70, 20%, 70 to 80, 19%, but 51 years old is old. Okay. Then I am very old. Transportation method, we thought maybe they were taking public transportation, but actually no, because these people were literally at home. 2% of car services, 9% were driving their own vehicle. Only 4% were taking public transportation, 2% walking, 84% were at home. Literally. Were they working? No, they were retired or they were unemployed. Only 17% working. So that says they’re not working, they’re not traveling. They’re predominantly downstate, predominantly minority, predominantly older, predominantly nonessential employees.
We were thinking that maybe we were going to find a higher percentage of essential employees who were getting sick because they were going to work. That these may be nurses, doctors, transit workers. That’s not the case, and they were predominantly at home. Now, that’s only three days, that’s just about 100 hospitals, 1,000 people. But it reinforces what we’ve been saying, which is much of this comes down to what you do to protect yourself. Everything is closed down, government has done everything it could, society has done everything it could. Now it’s up to you. Are you wearing the mask? Are you doing the hand sanitizer? If you have younger people who are visiting you and may be out there and may be less diligent with the social distancing, are you staying away from older people? Older starting at 51 by the way, but it comes down to personal behavior.
This is not a group that we can target with this information. It’s really about personal behavior.
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