Covid Positive Numbers Still Low for Georgetown

Here we go again…

As Covid numbers bounce back up across the country and here in DC, you may be wondering, what about Georgetown? So far, not bad. But there’s still some reason to worry.

According to the fantastic DCCovid.com site, Georgetown has largely avoided the alarming spike that DC is experiencing. DC tracks Covid data by neighborhood, and splits Georgetown into two areas: Georgetown (which is basically west Georgetown) and East Georgetown (which also includes a chunk of west Dupont).

West Georgetown has only reported two positive cases in the month of July. For reference, in February it reported over 100 positive cases.

East Georgetown has reported eleven positive cases in July. Obviously that’s worse than west Georgetown, but that’s still a fairly low rate. It’s impossible to tell whether those cases even came from Georgetown, or are more from west Dupont. The fact that Logan Circle and its environs has been a hotspot suggests that more cases probably did come from Dupont rather than east Georgetown.

So not terrible news. But we’re still not done with this yet. And in the case of east Georgetown, regardless of where the cases are, the numbers have gone up a lot over the last week. It was basically hovering around zero cases a day but now is over one case a day. Not huge in raw numbers, but huge in terms of growth. Let’s hope it simmers back down.

What are the vaccination rates in Georgetown, you ask? That’s also hard to say. DC reports that west Georgetown only has 23% fully vaccinated, with east Georgetown reporting 53%. Those numbers are misleading for a couple reasons. First, west Georgetown includes the GU campus. So when it says that 23% of west Georgetown is vaccinated, it is dividing the number of people vaccinated by a population number that is artificially inflated by several thousand students who aren’t here.

Secondly, DC’s vaccine data largely doesn’t capture people who got vaccinated outside DC. There’s about a 13-15 point difference between DC’s data and CDC’s data, which does capture out-of-state shots. So Georgetown might have a true rate closer to 65-70% inoculation. But who knows.