Just over two weeks after St. Louis County’s first death from COVID-19, its number of coronavirus deaths doubled between Friday and Monday as the county approaches 1,000 total cases.
The county now has 985 total cases and 14 deaths, up from 781 cases Friday and 663 Thursday, according to the latest numbers released Monday morning.
On Friday, the county had recorded seven deaths, but seven more patients died in the last three days.
Cases increased so much last week that the county has developed a new dashboard to track all the data related to the cases.
Originally, the county would send out a daily email noting new cases and then deaths. But as cases grew this week, the county stopped releasing daily breakdowns of age and gender. Instead, the county unveiled the new dashboard at STLCorona.com to keep track of the grim statistics related to the area’s COVID-19 outbreak.
The coronavirus hotline run by the county Department of Public Health — 314-615-2660 — received 235 calls in just one 24-hour period this week.
In the two weeks since March 23, the county’s cases have spiked from 101 to nearing 1,000.
For the first time Friday, the county released data by ZIP code showing the geographic location of cases so far.
The sixth death in the county, which the health department learned about Thursday, is of a man in his 70s, and it is not yet known if he had any underlying medical conditions.
As of the latest numbers on the dashboard Thursday, cases diagnosed in St. Louis County have been mostly female, with 344 female cases and 309 male cases.
Ages of cases are: three who are 0-9, 17 who are ages 10 to 19, 97 who are in their 20s, 76 in their 30s, 104 in their 40s, 154 in their 50s, 122 in their 60s, 59 in their 70s and 30 who are 80 to 99.
Although the county stopped releasing descriptive data on all cases, it released this information about the deaths to the virus so far:
Six victims have been female and eight have been male.
The death toll includes women in their 50s, 60s and 80s with underlying medical conditions. A woman in her 70s had “chronic” underlying conditions.
Among the men who have died, ages have been in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Two of the men in their 80s who died had underlying medical conditions, but it is not yet known whether another man in his 80s had any underlying conditions.
Two men in their 60s who died both had “chronic” underlying medical conditions, the county said, as did another man in his 70s.
The man in his 90s also had underlying conditions.
It is still unknown at this time whether the man in his 50s and one of the men in his 70s had underlying medical conditions that would have made them more susceptible to the disease.
As cases and deaths grow, the county warned Thursday that it may not be able to provide individual notifications beyond the dashboard of each new death, as officials “continue to adapt to best handle this evolving pandemic.”
