Why is No One Telling Us This Good News Regarding COVID?

Despite the students at Montana State University returning nearly a month ago. Despite Christmas and New Year's Eve parties. Despite the slow rollout of the coronavirus vaccine: COVID-19 deaths are dropping considerably. Yet, there seems to be no positive media coverage about this.

We're all in agreement that this is a good thing, right? I don't know about you, but if there's bad news to report about the coronavirus, the Media does not hesitate in giving us non-stop coverage of it. But what about the good news?

Now, I completely understand that, as a rule, bad news garners more clicks than good news. It's a sad fact in our world that tragedies are more popular with newspaper and blog readers than puppy dogs. But, in regards to COVID, knowing that the virus (at least right now and for about the past month) has been considerably on the decline, I would think that would be something people would want to know about and people would be interested in reading about. You would at least think that the Media would be interested in covering it. Perhaps you've seen a media outlet covering this story with the same intensity as the bad COVID news, but I have not. It seems to me that you have to actively seek to find any good news regarding COVID.

Here are some current numbers from the CDC and the Gallatin City-County Board of Health. Locally, COVID cases began dropping in January about the time the students returned to MSU after the Holidays. Most, including our health department, were concerned about getting another spike in cases after that. So far, that hasn't happened. In fact, the numbers have continued to fall for the past three weeks.

According to data provided by the Gallatin County Health Department, the rolling 7-Day average for COVID-19 cases has dropped from 93 on January 10th to 40 on January 28th.

Nationally, the CDC provisional death counts seem to mirror what is going on here in the Bozeman area. The CDC's data shows that death counts from COVID-19 have been falling for six consecutive weeks nationally.

It should be noted that provisional death rates can lag by a few weeks waiting for official death records to be submitted to the Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). Still, if you go back a few weeks on the charts provided by the CDC, you'll see that the number of COVID deaths nationally has fallen from 18,571 the week of December 12th to 3,899 the week of January 16th.

In Montana, new daily cases have been cut form our peak on November 20th of 1,237 cases a day to 490 on January 29, 2021. Again, all great news. But you have to look hard to find it because no one seems to want to report it. Yes, this could all change, but this is the data and how it's been tracking for the past three weeks and really since our peak in mid-November.

To look at the latest data for yourself from the Gallatin City-County Health Department, visit the links below.

Gallatin County COVID Data
Centers for Disease & Control and Prevention Data