By Tatiana Prophet

Like other governors around the country, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock announced restrictions this week, putting in place a statewide mask mandate starting Friday.

The Associated Press reported that the restrictions came as the “virus surges” in Montana. Does the data really show a surge? It’s hard to say definitively, since nationwide, cases and deaths are counted even when there is no laboratory-confirmed Covid test. As long as a doctor puts "Covid” as a cause on the death certificate, even if the determination is based on symptoms alone, that death is counted as a Covid-19 death.

First, the good news: More than half a million tests have been conducted in the state of Montana! That amounts to half of the entire population. And it means a heckuva lot of people have tested negative, at least so far.

Cases have jumped recently; but the word “surge” can be misleading if we don’t present hospitalizations and deaths at the same time. Positive cases have surged, by 40 percent since October 30, from 32,801 cases to 46,061, an increase of more than 13,000 cases. But that’s not the full picture; the number of Covid-related hospitalizations and deaths are important, too. In fact, they’re more important because they have to do with the ultimate impact on public health. Of all the positive cases in each time period in Montana, the fact remains that the mortality rate is hovering around 1 percent — not of the total population but of all positive cases in the state.

Some argue that patients who recover are forever changed; but in spite of some anecdotal accounts, a full picture of Covid altering one’s physical health permanently is not definitive, and we can say that because not only have there been few studies on the subject, but not enough time has passed, either.

The charts show that there have been zero deaths for Montanans age 0 to 29; and for the other age groups, death rates are very low — until the 70+ age range. And for the latest numbers reported, the median age of Covid-related deaths is 78. The average life expectancy of a male in the U.S. as of 2017 was 78.1.

The state of Montana numbers in these charts come from the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services. While their official reports show a total of 511 deaths (state population above 1,020,000), the CDC reported 37 deaths on November 14, the day after the state reports were published. The subsequent daily deaths in the state were: 6, 2, 21 and 18..

Montana has only 165 intensive care beds in the entire state and 3,000 general beds, according to the Montana Hospital Association. That's admittedly low for a state that now has more than 1 million people.

And 70 percent of the state's major hospitals' intensive care units have little to no available ICU beds. The majority of patients in these ICUs do not have Covid-19, but the Covid-19 patients are pushing these facilities to capacity.

Montana recorded 39 Covid-related deaths on Nov. 14, according to the CDC.

See data from the Nov. 14 report from the Montana Department of Health and Human Services. The report shows that currently there are 247 Covid patients in the hospital statewide, while there are 1,466 non-Covid patients hospitalized statewide. in the ICU, there are 55 Covid patients statewide and 89 non-Covid patients statewide.

Twenty-nine Covid patients are on ventilators while 89 non-Covid patients are on ventilators statewide.

Hot spots are Billings, and Poplar in Northeastern Montana, where the Fort Peck Reservation is with Assiniboine and Sioux tribes. There are 14 Covid patients at Roosevelt Medical Center in nearby Culbertson.

At Billings Clinic, there are 18 Covid patients in the ICU and 43 Covid patients in general hospital beds. There are are currently 11 Covid patients at Bozeman Deaconess Hospital, and none of them are in intensive care.

NOTE: Covid-related hospitalizations and deaths are recorded for both laboratory-confirmed and “suspected,” which means that some patients do not ever receive a Covid test but are suspected based on symptoms (there is a shortage of tests in the state, not to mention that it’s expensive to conduct autopsies and/or test post mortem). In the case of death, if the doctor puts Covid on the death certificate whether underlying cause or not, that death is counted as a Covid death — even if not laboratory-confirmed.

The important thing to remember is that, while cases rose by 40 percent in the last two weeks and the positivity rate grew by one point to reach 8 percent, the death rate actually fell slightly from 1.14 percent to 1.11 percent and the hospitalization rate was also lower. Hospitals are filling up, but there are still much more non-Covid patients hospitalized in Montana than Covid patients, and the state has a shortage of both hospital and ICU beds that predates the pandemic.

In Bozeman, there are 18 patients in the hospital, zero patients in the ICU, and there have been 13 deaths total since the pandemic began. In Billings, however, there have been 100 deaths, while the hospitalization rate is high at the Abissinoine and Sioux Reservation near Fort Peck in Roosevelt County.

The official death counts in both the state of Montana and the United States as a whole is not definitive for a couple of years; in fact, they are provisional. We can see that both pneumonia and influenza symptoms can appear Covid-like and vice versa, by the CDC’s own account.