I published a fifty-state count of 20,927 this morning when about to fly home after spending the week at IAFP in NOLA. It is now 21,452 – so much for “Under Control.”

Three states have moved since, and a fourth row in that table was wrong. Michigan added 387 people in a single day and now reports 10,773 cases, with hospitalizations holding at 193 because the state refreshes that figure only on Thursdays. West Virginia posted its Friday update and went from 245 to 268, still with 19 hospitalized. New York moved from 666 to 753, and that number now comes from the state health department itself rather than a secondhand roundup. The new fifty-state total is 21,452.

The fourth change is a correction I owe the reader. My table carried Alabama as publishing no count at all. Alabama has been publishing one since at least July 15. The Alabama Department of Public Health reported 28 cases as of July 20, two of them hospitalized, none fatal, with four tied to international travel and eight tied to two separate foodborne outbreaks at Mexican-style restaurants that the department says plainly are not Taco Bell. That last detail matters more than the twenty-eight does. Alabama does not connect those restaurant clusters to Taylor Farms and neither do I. What it does is put a second state alongside New Hampshire where a health department has named an eating establishment that has nothing to do with a Taco Bell, and it sits with North Carolina pointing at parsley and cilantro and with the six separate Cyclospora investigations FDA still has open on its own table. One recall does not explain over twenty-one thousand people, and I have never said it did.

The correction moves two of my own running lines. The number of states publishing no count of their own drops from fourteen to thirteen. And the group I have been describing for two weeks as states that received the recalled lettuce while publishing nothing about their own residents is down to two. It was Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri and South Carolina. Missouri fell out on Thursday at 593. Alabama falls out now. Mississippi and South Carolina are what is left.

One more thing surfaced in the sweep, and it is another argument for reading every number in the table below as a floor. Three states now publish two different totals, and I have been taking the smaller one every time. New York reports 753 since May 1 and 787 for the calendar year. North Carolina reports 718 since May 1 in its press release and 728 for the year on its own dashboard. Florida reports 254 since May 1 and 264 since January 1. 

Ohio held at 4,013 statewide today, and the county problem inside it got cleaner rather than smaller. Both figures are now dated July 31. The state puts Lucas County at 554. The Toledo-Lucas County Health Department puts Lucas County at 1,207, with 3,016 across northwest Ohio. 

Against all of that, the federal picture has not moved at all. CDC’s outbreak page still says 1,947 people and 98 hospitalizations across nine states, where it has sat since July 24. Its surveillance page still carries 6,707 laboratory-confirmed cases plus more than 11,500 awaiting confirmation across 45 states, published Tuesday and covering reports through July 27. Add those two federal figures together and Atlanta is describing 18,207 people. The fifty states describe 21,452. The two are 3,245 apart, close to eighteen percent, with the states higher. The named outbreak is now 9.08 percent of the illness this country is reporting.

Where each state stands tonight, with the source for every number.

Thirteen states in that table publish no count of their own. CDC says 45 states have cases, which means there are at least nine states where the federal government knows there are confirmed illnesses and a resident cannot look up how many. Thirteen more of these numbers trace to a single national roundup that has not been updated since July 17. Every figure above is a floor, and Alabama is tonight’s proof that a blank cell has never meant no illness. It has only ever meant that I had not found the answer yet.