Action News Jax’s Courtney Cole spoke to Jacksonville University geography professor, Ray Oldakowski, about the new way he’s comparing COVID-19 cases in Florida.
When you visit the state’s COVID-19 dashboard, you’ll notice it states the Department of Health can’t compare counties because “data is not adjusted by the population.”
That where Oldakowski comes in.
“Out of the large counties in the state, Miami-Dade has the highest infection rate — at about 8%. Where Duval’s half of that, at 4%,” said Oldakowski.
He’s been monitoring cases on a regular basis to get a better grasp of COVID-19 trends locally and statewide.
He told Cole he monitors COVID-19 case numbers statewide every two weeks.
It’s a part of geographic information system — or GIS mapping — research.
The geography professor said that local data shows Duval has the largest number of cases and highest percentage of cases.
“We are [at] about 1 million people in a state [with COVID-19] with 21 million people [in the entire state] at the last estimate. So we would be about 5% of the population, and we’re slightly under that as far as the number of cases. So we are not disproportionately high,” said Oldakowski.
Oldakowski said Miami-Dade is Florida’s hot spot, with a rate of 12% of the state’s population. But he said he will keep a close eye on counties big and small.
“Some of the counties in northeast Florida, they have really small populations. It really only takes a couple dozen, or 100 cases, to make their rates shoot up. I think it kind of demonstrates how quickly this virus can spread once it gets into a population as vulnerable,” said Oldakowski.
The Jacksonville University professor said he wanted to be able to supplement the information in the state’s COVID-19 dashboard.