As Alabama enters another week of COVID-19 shutdown, state and county health officials have increasingly relied on valuable patient data to pinpoint virus hotspots, allowing healthcare professionals and the public to make sense of what the data really means.

Mobile County Health Department (MCHD) has shared ZIP code and other demographic information with the public since April 13. The data also includes age, race and gender of those who have been infected or died.

However, medical professionals and county officials say the ZIP code data allows them to focus on harder hit areas, looking at how and why certain parts of the county are more infected than others. That could lead healthcare workers to focus efforts and resources more specifically, potentially leading investigators to the source of an outbreak in a care home or a church group, for example. In addition, knowing where hotspots are can assist the members of the public in making decisions.

In the most recently available data from Monday, the 36605 area of Mobile accounted for just under 10.6 percent of all infections. That area, where 20,000 people live south of the city, has the highest rate of infection, but it’s not the hardest hit area in raw totals by any means.

The area with the highest infection rates are listed as only “other 365” and “other 366.” Those two areas combined account for approximately 55 percent of all infections.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has certain rules about revealing full ZIP code information to the public.

“We are restricted from giving information in five-digit ZIP codes with less than 20,000 residents because of HIPAA regulations,” said Mark Bryant, Public Information Officer for MCHD. “For those with less than 20,000 residents, we can list the initial three digits.”

Bryant added: “Even with those restrictions, we have added a color-shaded map of Mobile County that indicates the relative density of cases from zero (white) or more than 70 (dark blue).”

The dark blues areas below correspond with denser areas of infection in west Mobile that lead back to the city’s midtown and southern areas.

Coronavirus zip code data has helped Mobile County officials identify hotspots.

A small percentage of the ZIP code data is currently unknown, leaving small gaps in knowledge of how the virus has been spreading. MCHD Epidemiologist Dr. Rendi Murphree said most of those unknown ZIP codes have come from private clinics that aren’t hospitals or doctors offices.

“So many of the ZIP codes are unknown because we are behind the eight ball on the investigations,” she said during a televised broadcast Friday. “So we find out about a positive lab and you know it on that live dashboard as soon as we know it. Then we have to go into the system and get that positive lab and pray that it has a phone number on it that we can contact that person on the same day. And that’s not always the case, particularly with some of the drive through clinics and pop up clinics. They have not always been good about getting good accurate addresses and telephone number on these folks.”

She added: “And so if we don’t have that on the lab report we have to use some of our people finding services to try to get a good telephone number on them and we’re not always able to contact them on the same day. And that’s the reason we have so many missing ZIP codes.”

Jefferson and Mobile county health departments have authority to make decisions and set rules at the local level for the state’s two most populated counties. But in Jefferson County, local health officials have yet to release any information on where the main hotspots are in the county.

The Alabama Department of Public Health has not released breakdowns by ZIP code for other 65 counties.

Given the heavy toll on the African American community, Birmingham City Council President William Parker and other members of the community have been calling for Jefferson County to release ZIP code data for COVID-19 cases. Dr. Mark Wilson, the county’s health officer, has said previously that he wants to release more data, but he wants to follow HIPPA rules.

Birmingham’s population is 74 percent black and roughly 15 percent of the population is over 65, the most at-risk demographic.

Mobile also releases demographic data about cases within the county. To date, 927 people have contracted COVID-19 in Mobile County, according to MCHD data from today. That’s the highest total in the state. Of that figure, a little over 11 percent have been hospitalized and 4.4 percent have died. Mobile reported 41 deaths from COVID-19, as of today, also highest in the state.

Sixty percent of the total figure of those infected in Mobile County have been women, while a majority are African American. The state has released similar demographic data for cases and deaths.

Dr. Murprhee said that demographic information, including ZIP code, is crucial.

“It tells us that it’s mostly women, that’s it’s mostly the 25-65 age group but a large proportion, more than we would like, are over the age of 65 – so it’s around 62.5 percent,” she said. “It also tells us that we have the most cases in the areas of our county where we have the densest population. In the outer lying ZIP codes we don’t see as many cases. People live further apart and often are not crowding their grocery stores and that sort of thing. This is the kind of thing we are looking at behind the scenes.”

Dr. Murphree said that people in the African American community are at a higher risk from coronavirus because of increased cases of diabetes and other underlying health conditions.