By BRENT MARTINSt. Joseph PostSt. Joseph city council members face a huge task each
week:&nbsp; trying to digest all the
information on the coronavirus pandemic.It’s important, because the data is used by the council to
decide city coronavirus policy.Missouri Western State University chemistry professor, Gary
Clapp, helps the council interpret the massive amount of data gathered on
COVID-19, which he agrees could seem like trying to drink water from a fire
hose.“Or, the bottom of a waterfall,” Clapp tells St. Joseph Post
with a chuckle.Clapp approached Mayor Bill McMurray early on, offering his
expertise to consolidate all that information into an easier to understand
report he forwards to them before every Thursday afternoon work session on the
coronavirus.“We had that communication and they started sharing the data
with me and then I started sending them back three or four graphs that I
thought were pertinent, that they could easily see and that they could make
decisions; is this slope going up or is this slope going down?,” Class says. “And,
they seemed to like it.”St. Joseph council members will not be meeting in a work
session this afternoon. There is a regular council meeting scheduled for
Tuesday. On the agenda is a bill sponsored by Mayor McMurray to adopt COVID-19
pandemic regulations. The city of St. Joseph requires masks in retail stores of
at least 10,000 square feet. Council members have been mulling over the
possibility of expanding that requirement.Clapp says the COVID-19 trend had seemed to flatten out and
then trend down. Until lately. Now, the number of new coronavirus cases in
Buchanan County have been on the rise.New cases began to rise on August 24th, a Monday,
when St. Joseph health officials reported 19 new cases. It would be the
beginning of a tough week. On Tuesday, the 25th, 24 new cases were
reported, then 20 on the 26th, 25 on the 27th, and 21 on
Friday, the 28th. New cases fell to 14 on Saturday, then bumped up
to 20 on Sunday, falling to 14 on Monday. Cases began to rise again Tuesday
with 24 new cases reported. On Wednesday, Buchanan County reported 32 new cases
of COVID-19.Clapp crunches all the data and reports from various
authorities and distills the information into a more comprehensible form for
the council to consider at its work sessions.“So, I would plot the average for every day of the past 14
days and then I would do what is called a linear regression on it and then that
would draw us a line,” Clapp says. “So, if the line is sloping up, meaning that
we’re having an average increase of cases per day, that’s bad and the CDC says when
your moving average is a positive number, it’s going higher, then you need to
be concerned about the growth in cases.”Interesting facts emerge in the data. The largest number of
cases in Buchanan County are among those in their 20s. More men than women have
contracted the disease. Buchanan County reports more than 775 men have tested
positive for COVID-19 while around 675 women have tested positive.Clapp, though, points out COVID-19 is extremely dangerous for one
particular segment of our society.“COVID is not alive. It needs a host. That’s how a virus lives
and this virus is really nasty to people who can’t fight it off,” according to
Clapp. “And s0, while some of us who are very young don’t seem to fight it off
there may be some underlying conditions we don’t fully understand, but for the
most part when we look at the numbers, we know that the most people it kills are
80-plus (years of age),”In total, Buchanan County has had 1,459 cases of COVID-19
since counting began; 1,215 confirmed and 244 probable. The county has recorded
12 coronavirus-related deaths.

MWSU professor helps condense COVID-19 data into form council can digest