Cary COVID Report – August 23

Cary, NC – In the last week, daily new infections jumped in Wake County, NC and across the nation. Many tie the spike to the return of students to colleges and universities.

Wake County Infection Rate Spikes

After a month-long downward trend, daily new infections in Wake County jumped back up over 1,000 for the week ending August 23, 2020.

College and University Re-Openings Fuel New Cases

Colleges and universities across the Triangle have responded in different ways to the pandemic.

UNC Chapel Hill drew national headlines by opening and closing their campus with one week. NC State ended in-person classes with much less fanfare a week later, but kept the dorms open. Today, it was announced the dorms at State would close. Duke is still having some in-person classes.

Colleges and universities also have taken different approaches to portraying Covid data and informing their communities. UNC Chapel Hill gets an A+ for their Coronavirus Dashboard. NC State and Duke also have dashboards.

The News & Observer has a chart of Covid-19 data from colleges and universities in North Carolina. UNC has the most cases with 883, followed by NC State with 546 and App State with 202. Duke has reported 37 cases.

Around the U.S.

The map of new Covid cases in the U.S., so green for the last few weeks, is showing more red and pink in the last seven days, indicating an upward trend in new cases, according to Johns Hopkins.

However, new cases in the U.S. have been steadily declining for almost a month, falling from a moving day average of 66,781 on July 25 to 42,310 on August 23.

In the last seven days, the infection rate per 100k in the U.S. has continued to fall, from 105 down to 91.

Around the World

Worldwide, new daily infections have declined slightly over the last two weeks, 261,101 to 249,308. India now leads the world in new daily infections.

Source: The New York Times.

Europe is seeing new outbreaks in Britain, France, Spain and Germany.

For context, Britain reported 7,512 new Covid cases in the last seven days. North Carolina reported 11,053. Britain has a population of 66 million. North Carolina has a population of 10.5 million.

Story from staff reports.