Although the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 has been dropping in Park County, three Powell residents recently died after contracting the virus.

All three lived at the Rocky Mountain Manor. They were the seventh, eighth and ninth Park County residents to die in connection with COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic in March, according to Park County Health Officer Dr. Aaron Billin.

Two of those deaths have yet to be officially confirmed as COVID-19-related by the Wyoming Department of Health, Billin said, as there’s a lag between the time a person dies and when their death certificate is completed and submitted to the state.

The nine local deaths have come among some 1,860 confirmed and probable cases in the county over the past nine months.

Testing showed that more than half of the residents at Rocky Mountain Manor — 35 of 61 — became infected with the novel coronavirus around the Thanksgiving holiday, said Cindy Ibarra, the manager of the facility.

The illnesses at the senior apartment complex, she said, set in and spread over the course of just one week.

“We were able to contain it, but in that short time, that’s just how quickly it happened,” Ibarra said. She said the sickness and deaths “have been really hard on us.”

Following a “brutal” few weeks, “we are coming out of it,” Ibarra said Wednesday, with no additional cases identified.

She added that it could have been “a lot” worse, praising the assistance provided by Billin and Park County Public Health; Dr. Mike Tracy of 307Health also provided assistance in testing all the residents amid the outbreak.

The outbreak was particularly challenging because many manor residents needed caregivers, Ibarra said, but numerous people in the Powell community either had COVID-19 or were quarantining after being exposed to the virus.

Dr. Billin “has come in and personally checked on each resident to make sure they were OK” and identified which people needed to go to the hospital, Ibarra said. “So we owe him so very much; I can’t even begin to explain it.”

Staff at the manor and the residents who did not contract COVID-19 received their initial doses of Pfizer’s vaccine this week — “That all went well,” Ibarra said — and the rest of the residents are tentatively scheduled to be immunized in February.

Meanwhile, the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in Park County has fallen from a peak of 15 patients on Dec. 8 to eight on Monday.

There’s been a similar trend across the entire state. On Nov. 30, hospitals around Wyoming reported having 247 patients hospitalized with COVID-19; as of Monday, that number had fallen by more than a third, to 161 patients.

The hospitalizations still remain significantly elevated from the summer. For example, there were generally only one or two people hospitalized with the novel coronavirus in Park County at a given time until the first part of October.

Over the past month, state data shows there has been little change in the number of new infections being logged. Between Nov. 23 and Tuesday, there have generally been 22 to 25 confirmed and probable COVID-19 cases identified in Park County each day, when calculated as a 14-day rolling average.

As of Tuesday, the Wyoming Department of Health reported that 137 people in Park County had confirmed or probable active cases of COVID-19.

Billin had previously said that the department’s count of active cases was running high, because of accidental duplications in the state’s database. (For instance, on Nov. 23, the state reported 306 active infections in the county, when Billin counted only 133.) However, he said Monday that the Department of Health has corrected the problem and the state and county figures now match up.

The overwhelming majority of people who become infected with the novel coronavirus recover at home, with some not even realizing they’re ill. But the virus can lead to serious illness, particularly among those who are older or who have underlying health conditions.

That range of severity was seen at the manor, Ibarra said. Some people in their 90s never showed any symptoms, while others — including the three residents who died — “got so sick,” she said.

“Even since it’s been, you know, three weeks, we still have some that are still very, very frail from it, that were ... very healthy before and they’re still trying to recover from it,” Ibarra said. “So it hits elderly so hard; I can’t even explain what I’ve seen in the last few weeks.”

She called COVID-19 “a horrible, horrible disease.”

(Editor's note: This version corrects the rough number of confirmed and probable cases recorded in Park County since March. The original figure only included confirmed cases.)