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A late summer and autumn surge in cases of COVID-19 appears to have subsided, with the number of active infections and hospitalizations remaining at lower levels.
Speaking at Tuesday’s …
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A late summer and autumn surge in cases of COVID-19 appears to have subsided, with the number of active infections and hospitalizations remaining at lower levels.
Speaking at Tuesday’s meeting of the Park County School District 1 Board of Trustees, Superintendent Jay Curtis said the number of COVID infections and quarantines in the Powell-based district had dropped to its lowest level since the beginning of the school year in August.
In the first few months of the school year, “we would kind of drop, and then we would bounce back up and then we would drop,” Curtis said. “Well, we’ve been on a consistent downward trend now for three weeks.”
On Tuesday, he reported six positive cases among students and staff, plus 24 others in some form of quarantine.
“That feels really good,” Curtis said of the lower numbers. “It feels kind of like we’re on the backside of that spike that we had, primarily due to the delta variant.”
Across Park County, there were 85 people with active confirmed or probable cases of COVID-19, according to the Wyoming Department of Health. That was effectively the same number as the prior week, but down from a peak that reached 200 active infections.
Meanwhile, the number of people hospitalized with the virus in Park County dropped. As of Tuesday, there were nine patients in the county — down from 11 the prior week — with six patients at Cody Regional Health and three at Powell Valley Healthcare. That’s the fewest since August.
Citing the unavailability of staff, the Department of Health did not release an update this week on the number of deaths caused or contributed to by COVID-19. Since March 2020, the deaths of 98 Park County residents have been tied to the virus out of 5,445 confirmed and probable cases.
As of Monday, a total of 12,064 Park County residents had been fully vaccinated, representing about 41.3% of the population. While that was an increase of 127 people from the prior week, the county is falling further behind the state as a whole, where 41.7% of the population is now vaccinated.
(Tessa Baker contributed reporting.)
