Highland County has seen its first COVID-19 case spike in months, according to The New York Times COVID-19 Tracker.
Last updated on Tuesday, the tracker said that the county was averaging one COVID-19 hospital admission rate per day on Aug. 5. The tracker said that this was the first time COVID-19 has been shown in the county since May 27, 2023, when the daily average COVID-19 hospital admission rate was two 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 Highland County residents have received the “primary series” vaccination, with 72 percent of the population ages 65 and over having taken it. It also said that 8 percent of the population has received the “Bivalent” booster, with 26 percent of the population ages 65 and over having received it.
The tracker said that the updated vaccine is still “recommended” for adults and “most children.”
In Ohio, The New York Times COVID-19 Tracker said that the daily average COVID-19 hospital admission rate was 68 on Aug. 4, with that being the highest rate since June 19, 2023, when it was also 68. It said this was a 24-percent increase from 14 days prior.
Statistics from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), updated Monday, said that the test positivity in Ohio has also seen in increase through Aug. 5. From the week prior, the CDC said the state had seen a 1.4 percent increase, with the testing volume from those two weeks being 18,942 from “COVID-19 nucleic antigen amplification tests.”
In the U.S. as a whole, The New York Times COVID-19 Tracker said that three of its four metrics were slowly on the uptick. The metric climbing the most evidently, according to the tracker, is the test positivity rate, which it said rose to 10.6 percent on Aug. 5, with it being only 7.5 percent two weeks ago.
Statistics from the CDC showed that hospital admissions are up 14.3 percent to 10,320 people for the week ending on Aug. 5 compared to the week prior in the United States. It also said that the percentage of deaths due to COVID-19 are also up by 10 percent to 1.1 percent for the same time period.
“It is ticking up a little bit, but it’s not something that we need to raise any alarm bells over,” said Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Reach Jacob Clary at 937-402-2570.
