x
Breaking News
More () »

Shelby County reports 33 COVID-19 deaths, but it's not what it seems

Medical experts said deaths reflective of adjusted data across months, not one-day deadly surge

MEMPHIS, Tenn — "This is some pretty complicated number crunching to do to keep track of such a terrible thing," Dr. Steve Threlkeld with Baptist Memorial Hospital said.

That's why Dr. Threlkeld cautioned the public to not be too alarmed Friday, when the Shelby County Health Department reported its highest number of one-day COVID-19 related deaths the entire pandemic: 33.

"It doesn't mean that 33 people died yesterday, thankfully, that really happened over time as unfortunate as that is still then," Dr. Threlkeld said.

A Shelby County Health Department spokesperson said Friday: "The surveillance team made adjustments to reflect the status of 33 people who died between August 15th & October 1st for whom the data wasn't complete or up to date."

"You want the numbers to eventually be right and even if you didn't catch something along the way, you find out if you missed a few points of data and you see that there may have been more people that had COVID then you realize," Dr. Threlkeld.

The infectious disease expert at Baptist said the lag in confirming and recording COVID-19 related local deaths can stretch out even longer with lengthy hospitalizations.

"Deaths in COVID-19, particularly now that we are better in treating the infection even, they don't come right away and so the deaths we still have from this disease, they may have gotten sick six weeks ago or more," Dr. Threlkeld said.

Even with Friday's largest one-day jump of new reported COVID-19 deaths, it still accounts for less than 2% of Shelby County's total COVID-19 cases to date.

That's below the national percentage but slightly ahead of the COVID-19 mortality rate in Tennessee.

In Arkansas and Tennessee, more broadly, medical experts are also keeping a close eye in an uptick in hospitalizations.

Tuesday to Thursday said new records each day in COVID-19 hospitalizations in Arkansas and in Tennessee, Vanderbilt University researchers point to a nearly 25% increase in statewide COVID-19 hospitalizations since October 1.

"Hospitalizations are a lagging metric that follow cases by a couple of weeks, so even if we act now to make changes, it's going to take a couple of weeks to bring that arc down, we can anticipate it going up for a while," Dr. Melissa McPheeters of Vanderbilt University said.

Before You Leave, Check This Out