8 August 2020 — 0604 mdt
Mainstream news media should report rates of infection
Flathead County remains a Covid-19 hot spot with
180 active cases, third among Montana’s counties
There’s more bad news to add to those grim numbers. To the 180, one must add 47 or fewer tourists and summer residents whose positive Covid-19 tests are assigned to the state of their primary residence. And the Flathead’s 1.7 infections per 1,000 residents is above the 1.5 per 1,000 state average.
Big Horn County’s 19.2 cases per 1,000 infection rate is more than an order of magnitude higher than Yellowstone County’s 3.3 per 1,000. Yet Yellowstone’s estimated 2020 population is an order of magnitude higher than Big Horn’s.
Big Horn’s infection rate caused the Crow and Northern Cheyenne nations to impose curfews beginning at 2000 MDT and ending at 0600 the next morning, reported the Billing Gazette’s Juliana Sukut. In her story, Sukut provided valuable context:
The county currently has the highest per capita percentage of cases in the state, according to data compiled by the county on Tuesday.
With more than 360 cases, about 1.5% of the population has currently tested positive for the virus. The second highest is Yellowstone county, which has seen nearly 2,000 COVID-19 cases.
Montana’s news media need to include infection rate data in their stories so that readers have a yardstick for measuring how the pandemic is affecting counties. The Montana Free Press does this, and does it well.
Montana’s news media also need to provide data on how Montana’s infection rates compare with those of other states. One means of doing this is publishing the daily map drawn by the Covid Tracking Project that displays the cases per million persons rates for all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Now, the table of cases and rates for Montana’s counties. You can download the table as an Excel spreadsheet.