There has been an alarming nationwide spike in COVID-19, and Cobb County is no exception.

In a video interview with Cobb County Communications Director Ross Cavitt on November 19, Janet Memark, the District Health Director of Cobb & Douglas Public Health (CDPH) said, “We continue to have a steady increase in the number of cases that we’re seeing.”

“It’s just been a steady increase over the last few weeks,” she said “So we’re at 235 cases per 100,000 (of population).”

“That’s not including the antigens. And so we have some pretty substantial community transmission right now,” Memark said.

“We have 487 deaths,” she said (Editor’s note: as of the publication of this article the death count has risen to 488).

“As for hospitalizations, we have critically low critical care beds at this point, so probably one available in the county,” Memark said. “And then there are low medical surgical beds.”

“Previously I said that the hospitals were busy and they weren’t all COVID patients,” she said. “Well, we’re seeing more and more COVID patients that are being admitted.”

“It’s definitely been at least 20 percent over the last week or two that we’ve seen an increase,” she said.

Dr. Memark said that the surge in cases is nationwide.

“There’s a surge throughout the nation right now,” she said. “And when I read this morning, there were only three states that were not experiencing a surge. So we were definitely part of that.”

Memark repeated the advice from the CDC to avoid travel over the holidays, and said that a lot of the transmission lately has been occurring in small groups.

Watch the interview with Dr. Janet Memark

The daily COVID-19 status report

The daily status report from the Georgia Department of Public Health is posted daily at 3 p.m.

In addition to the total confirmed cases, hospitalization and death, the report includes other information such as demographic breakdown by race/ethnicity, sex and age.

You can also download the data in CSV format at this link, so you can open it in a spreadsheet and build different views of the data yourself.

There is also a guide to understanding the data here.

The Georgia Department of Public Health describes the data collection process as follows:

The Daily Status Report is updated once daily at 3 p.m. Data are reported to the Georgia Department of Public Health (DPH) from numerous labs, hospitals and providers in various ways.

Electronic Laboratory Reports (ELR) are data files transmitted to DPH that contain patient identifiers, test information and results. Individual “case” reports may also be submitted through DPH’s secure web portal, SendSS, from healthcare providers and other required reporters. These reports often contain more specific patient information. In either reporting scenario, data may be incomplete.

Data displayed on the DPH Daily Status Report reflect the information transmitted to DPH, but may not reflect all current tests or cases due to timing of testing and data reporting