LANSING, MI - The Ingham County Health Department held a media briefing on Tuesday, May 12th.

The event went live at 3:30 pm on Zoom with the media in attendance and was hosted by Health Communication Specialist and Public Information Officer Amanda Darche, MPH and Ingham County Health Officer Linda Vail to give an update on the COVID-19 pandemic and answer questions from the media.

Linda Vail begins her presentation on the current COVID-19 cases and says, “Today we report 594 cases, 17 deaths, which has been our number for a few days now. 3 in the hospital inpatient with 2 of them in ICU (intensive care unit), 356 at home with 218 recovered giving a 2.8% case fatality rate based on the cases we have actually confirmed. Monitoring, as you know, has to do with traveling and other exposures and these people have been under quarantine and monitored by my staff. 642 of them were complete and are still actively monitoring 274 people.”

Vail also broke down the percentage of people hospitalized compared to the people who are at home due to COVID-19, using a pie chart with the status of COVID-19 patients in Ingham County stating that 99% are at home, while a small percentage are in the hospital. “When you break that down, hospitalized and ICU, and split those in two more numbers, you get 0% and should probably put less than 1 on that. With 37 % recovered, 3% fatality rate, and 60% at home,” said Vail.

During Vail’s presentation, she displayed a cumulative graph to show everyone the curve is flattening as Vail had hoped for and said, “We’ve had a decrease in the number of new cases we’ve had per day. Fairly substantial in the last 7 days. Sometimes we report the number of cases on the graph of the incidence curve, but we go back to the date of the onset of symptoms and if we don’t have a date for the onset of symptoms, it’s a date that a person was submitted into our system and referred to testing. That is how we come up for a date for cases, which will vary a little bit for what you see in new cases reported out by the media per day," Vail said.

A map of Ingham County was displayed with a graph percentage of positive tests on days that have been dropped, as well as COVID-19 and hospitalizations daily chart and the numbers trending downward for Ingham County residents. "By zip code prevalence, we still see 48911 way out ahead as the highest frequency of cases, along with 48910 and 48823.” The cases range from Lansing, East Lansing, Okemos, and Mason. If looked at by rate, given that we have a number of zip codes that have more than 20% of cases, we started calculating rates with just those zip codes," Vail said.

The number of COVID-19 cases in Ingham County by sex are 51% male and 49% female. The age groups in Ingham County are 20-29 and 30-59, and a lower percentage by ages 40-49 and 50-59. The highest cases are from ages 20-59, the highest percentage of the population, and lower numbers with the 0-9 and the 80 age group. The percentage of COVID-19 cases in the 48911 area are almost at 35% with ages 30-39 being the highest.

Vail says, “By race were 46% Caucasians, 27% African American, 17% Asian, and 3% other. By cases in the 48911 zip code, over 40% of cases are Asian, 27% cases for African American, and drop down to 16-17% Caucasians. If looked at by rate and prevalence, the rate for Caucasians is 130, for African American at 450, and the rate for Asians is 3,339, and other at 158.”

The Ingham County Health Department has began tracking confirmed case by ethnicity, starting with Hispanic or Latino at 8.7%, not Hispanic or Latino at 79.9%, and 11.6% unknown and by prevalence rate, not Hispanic or Latino are at 175.4 and Hispanic or Latino at 221.1 population.

Vail also went over the deceased from confirmed cases by statistics by percent and says, “Ages “50-59: 11.8%, 60-69: 17.6%, 70-79: 41.2% and 80 plus by 29.4%. By males 59%, and females 41% in deaths, and with race African Americans 41% and Caucasians at 59%.”

The Ingham County Health Department meets twice a week for media briefings on the latest updates on COVID-19 on Tuesdays and Fridays at 3:30pm.