COVID cases trending down in county for the week

By Adam Strunk

So far, no additional COVID cases have been caused by the initial Bethel cluster of students.

The news follows the school having 50 students and employees test positive during mandatory testing at the beginning of the school year.

The information was made available during a weekly press conference with the Harvey County Health Department.

“We’re doing a bang up job making sure those folks are staying quarantined and we’ve had a lot of great cooperation with Bethel College on that, as well,” Harvey County Health Department Director Lynnette Redington said.

The county now has 42 active cases and 275 total cases and conducted tests on 4,332 individuals. Over a two-week period, the county showed 12.4 percent of those tested for COVID-19 have tested positive for the disease.

In other positive outbreak news, Redington said that there have been no new cases from a cluster of COVID-19 previously discovered at Presbyterian Manor, earlier in the month.

Redington said the number of positive cases in the county were decreasing when you removed last week’s large jump in cases caused by Bethel’s mandatory testing.

“If we remove those numbers, we’re really kind of starting to see a trend down,” she said, adding that people need to wear masks, wash their hands and practice social distancing.

On Tuesday, the county had averaged about 2.5 new cases per day during the last week. Only four times has that average dipped below three cases since July 12.

0 replies on “COVID cases trending down in county for the week”