Wednesday Daily Status Report Shows Slight Drops In Seven-Day Rolling Averages Of COVID-19 Cases, Deaths In District

***No New Cases, Deaths At Long-Term Care Homes***

The 10-county Northeast Health District added 19 new confirmed COVID-19 cases and one death attributed to the disease in the Wednesday Daily Status Report of the Department of Public Health.

The figures resulted in slight drops in the seven-day averages of added cases (from 27.0 from 27.3) and deaths (from 2.0 to 1.6).

Oconee County was one of four counties in the 10-county Northeast Health District that did not add a new COVID-19 case on Wednesday.

The single death was of an 87-year-old female in Walton County without known chronic conditions.

The Northeast Health District had good news in the Wednesday Department of Community Health Long-Term Care Facility Report.

That report added no new cases of COVID-19 among residents of the 22 long-term care homes in the District with some contamination from the disease, no new deaths, and no new cases of staff infection.

The number of residents of those 22 facilities currently with the disease dropped from 217 on Tuesday to 211 with the 2 p.m. Wednesday report.

The Georgia Emergency Management Agency reported on Wednesday that the number of Critical Care Beds available at area hospitals had dropped by two each of the last two days but remained at 22, well above the low point of 10 on June 4.

State Data

The Department of Public Health said on Wednesday that 731 new confirmed cases of COVID-19 were reported for Georgia as a whole, and the seven-day average of added cases increased from 720.3 on Tuesday to 726.6 on Wednesday.

The Department of Public Health added 44 new deaths attributed to COVID-19 in the Wednesday Daily Status Report, and the seven-day average of added deaths increased to 29.4 from 26.1 on Tuesday.

Of those deaths, according to the Department of Public Health, only 10 occurred in the last 14 days. Two of the deaths, according to the report, were on March 30, and 11 were in April.

The Department of Public Health also eliminated three deaths it had previously listed, meaning that the actual number of added deaths was 47, not the reported 44.

Two of the three eliminated deaths were in the last 14 days, and one was on May 21.

Isn’t possible to know if the three eliminated cases were added at another date or dropped from the report entirely, but it is clear they were subtracted from the tally shown on Wednesday.

Tests And Results

The Department of Public Health has altered the way is records tests in the Daily Status Report and, starting June 2, began reporting the number of molecular tests (to determine if the person has the disease) and serologic tests (to determine if the person has antibodies to the disease) as well as the outcomes of those specific tests.

The data are only for those tests reported via its system of Electronic Lab Reporting, according to the report.

If the disease is abating, the molecular tests should show declines in the percentage of positive outcomes as tests expand. The Department of Public Health reported adding 13,850 new molecular tests in its Wednesday report and has averaged 11,864 new tests per day over the last week.

That does not appear to be happening in the relatively short period for which data are available, as Chart 5 below shows.

The Department of Community Health added one new long-term care facility to its list of homes with COVID-19 in its Wednesday report.

The Georgia Emergency Management Agency reported a decrease of 17 of the number of Current Confirmed COVID-19 Hospitalizations and a decrease of 32 in the number of ventilators in use.

Charts

All five charts below are from the Department of Public Health Daily Status Report and are updated based on the release of the report at 3:04 p.m. on Wednesday.

The first two charts are for the 10-county Northeast Health District of the Department of Public Health.

The final three charts are for the state of Georgia.

Chart 1 (Click To Enlarge)

Chart 2 (Click To Enlarge)

Chart 3 (Click To Enlarge)

Chart 4 (Click To Enlarge)

Chart 5 (Click To Enlarge)