COVID-19 area update

By George Shaw

The State of North Carolina tracks four primary metrics to determine whether to relax guidelines on reopening the economy. Each of these measures have shown significant improvement in the last week. Similarly, the trends for new cases and deaths are positive for Wake County as well as for the northern part of the county.

The number of cases for North Carolina rose 8979 (5% increase) and the number of deaths 183 (7% growth) during the last week. This is a reduction from a 7% growth for both cases and deaths during the prior week. North Carolina’s rank among the 50 states in terms of cases per million population declined from 24th to 26th but remained 31st for deaths. It moved up from the 25th highest rate of tests to the 24th.

Tests decreased by 5% from 26.3 thousand daily to 24.9 thousand. The percentage testing positive declined from more than 6% a week ago to 5.7% today. This is based on a 14 day moving average.  The goal is to have the positive testing rate below 5% over the prior two weeks.  imilarly, the moving average for hospitalizations from the virus declined from 941 a week ago to 893 today, a reduction of 5%.

New cases in Wake County decreased to 622 in the last week from 1146, a reduction of 46%. However, deaths increased from 6 to 10.

There were 41 new cases in our Zip Code 27587 down from 74 a week ago for a total of 850. This represents a 5% rate of growth for this week vs. about 10% for the previous seven-day period. And there have been no new fatalities from the virus since August 21, which remains at 30.

Zip Code 27571 (Rolesville) reported only 2 new cases this past week to bring its total to 67. Zip 27596 (Youngsville) rose from 194 to 207 cases. This increase of 13 cases compares with growth of 24 last week. Zip 27571 has reported no deaths; Zip 27596 continues to report a single fatality.

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