Hoosier State Today

Indiana finds itself at 633 deaths per million making it 33rd 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. 

Indiana’s deaths and hospitalizations have not followed the same path as case increases and, instead, the state had slightly above 200 people per million in hospitals, which isn’t anywhere near increased case numbers. 

“Indiana registers fewer 45% the death rate of Massachusetts, and approximately 1/3 that of New York. In terms of managing hospital resources,” the commentary states, “Indiana has done even better than those numbers. During Indiana's spring peak, it had approximately 1/3 the hospital utilization of Massachusetts, and 1/5 that of New York. It has only barely exceeded 200 people hospitalized per million. It has an unemployment rate that is just over 6.2%, 2.5x lower than Hawaii's. Indiana is seeing its cases go up, but its deaths and hospitalization rates lag far behind, indicating that this surge in cases will be like many of the summer surges, generating a hump, but not a spike.”

 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.