Maryland State Wire

Maryland finds itself at 683 deaths per million making it 35th in the country when it comes to COVID-related deaths, according to the COVID Tracking Project.

 The project found that when it comes to COVID-19 data, people have been looking at decontextualized data, which is causing hysteria like children staying out of school and businesses shutting down. 

 Maryland’s deaths and hospitalizations have not followed the same path as case increases and, instead, the state had a peak of 270 people per million in hospitals. 

 “Maryland has fewer than half the deaths/million of Massachusetts, and 1/3 that of New York, this despite having very similar make-up particularly to Massachusetts in terms of population, and population density and dispersion,”the commentary states. “At its peak, Maryland had approximately 270 people hospitalized/million. At the same time, their peak deaths/day/million stands at 8. Despite a slight hump in hospitalizations in the summer, deaths have remained extremely low, even when Maryland supposedly had a summer case spike. Maryland's unemployment rate is also lower at 7.2%. ”

 Since Sept. 15, there has been a significant increase in testing for COVID-19 at 55 percent, which has also led to an increase in positive cases, leading many to assume the country is heading into a third wave of infections and deaths.

 Emily Burns with The Pragmatist writes that it’s important to put the new numbers into context so that people will make wise decisions regarding what to do about the pandemic. She writes that in May, cases were tracked at nearly the same as hospitalizations. She notes that deaths and hospitalizations are more reliable data when tracking than cases are.

 With COVID-19 testing up 70 percent since the second wave, Burns points out that the surge in testing is responsible for the increased number of new cases seen across the nation, not an increased infection rate many have been led to believe.