A recent brief decrease in Covid-19 in Highland County was still significantly higher than the lowest moments of only a couple of months ago, according to The New York Times COVID-19 Tracker.
Last updated on Monday but showing statistics from a couple of weeks ago, the tracker said that the county was averaging four Covid-19 hospital admissions per day on Feb. 3, 2024. The tracker said this was a 32-percent decrease compared to 14 days earlier when the rate was at 11. However, that decrease comes after a significant and evident week-to-week increase from four cases on Nov. 18, 2023, to nine cases on Nov. 25, 2023.
Following that increase and as a previous article in The Times-Gazette reported, the Christmas season brought a meteoric rise in COVID cases, as on Dec. 16, 2023, the tracker reported that Highland County had 13 cases per day, which was the highest-reported case rate since the highest of the pandemic in early 2022.
After that high, Highland County saw multiple more weeks after New Year’s on Jan. 6 and Jan. 13 the county saw 11 cases per day.
“Data is from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Hospitalization data is a daily average of Covid-19 patients in hospital service areas that intersect with Highland County, an area which may be larger than Highland County itself,” the tracker said. “The number of daily hospital admissions shows how many patients tested positive for Covid in hospitals and is one of the most reliably reported indicators of Covid’s impact on a community.”
The tracker said that 39 percent of the total Highland County population has received the “primary series” of vaccinations, with 72 percent of the population ages 65 and above having received it. It said that 8 percent of the population has received the “Bivalent” booster, with 26 percent of the population ages 65 and up having received it.
The tracker said that the updated vaccine is still recommended for adults and most children.
The tracker said that weekly deaths have continued to trail off significantly in Ohio, as for the week of Jan. 28 to Feb. 3, there were 19 new deaths, with that number the lowest since the Covid-19 lulls of the 2023 summer. However, the tracker also said that the percentage of deaths due to Covid-19 has only recently started to fall after rising for multiple months. It said that for the four-week period of Jan. 7 to Feb. 3, the percentage of deaths was 3.6 percent, which was up from the summer numbers of less than 1 percent.
Statistics from the CDC, updated Monday, said that the test positivity in Ohio has seen a decrease through Feb. 3, with the test positivity now at 9.6 percent from last week and a test volume at 25,054 people from “Covid-19 nucleic antigen amplification tests.”
In the U.S. as a whole, the New York Times COVID-19 Tracker said that the country is seeing a decline from the highs of around a month ago but is still up significantly from the latter months of 2023 in daily Covid-19 hospital admissions. The tracker said that on Jan. 27, the country saw 5,401 hospital admissions, with that a 20-percent decrease from two weeks ago.
The tracker said that all four metrics for the U.S. were on the relative decline. The metric falling the most evidently is the test positivity rate, which has fallen to 10 percent for the period of Jan. 28 to Feb. 3, compared to a high of 12.9 percent around a month ago.
Reach Jacob Clary at 937-402-2570.
