Major jump in cases partially due to lab delays — 51 new cases, 14 hospitalized, 431 total — Aug. 8 (with graphs) • The Mendocino Voice

WILLITS, 8/8/20 — Mendocino County saw a major jump in the number of confirmed COVID cases today, which are partially attributed to a “process change,” at the UCSF lab. Of the 51 new cases announced today, 34 are attributable to the lab delay, according to Mendocino Public Health — those cases should be added to the case count from the past eight days.

The total number of COVID cases plotted against the left vertical axis, in blue. The new cases per day are represented as black bars plotted against the right axis. A rolling average of new cases is visualized in red, plotted against the right vertical axis. This is presented in a logarithmic which better presents the data over a larger numbers.

However, even with those extraneous cases subtracted, there were still 17 new cases today on top of 17 new cases yesterday, marking an acceleration in new cases. The record day for new cases in Mendocino was July 12, with 19. However, that was a Sunday with zero cases the previous day, indicating that the high count on that day was likely an artifact of many test results coming back at once. If we add in the 34 cases going back to July 31, we get an average number of new cases per day of 14.7 for the past nine days, definitely the highest average number of new cases since the pandemic began — demonstrating that infection rates are increasing, and the pandemic is far from controlled.