Every night on the news we report on the latest COVID numbers. And, recently, there seems to be a downward trend in the number of new cases.
There were 30 new cases reported on Monday, 77 on Tuesday, and 57 last night - where in early December we were seeing multiples of those numbers.
Of course, this is also a reflection of how many tests are being done - but what the public wants to know is are the numbers trending down? And is the curve that raged up in mid-December starting to flatten?
Today in a Zoom interview, I asked the Director of Health Services about the positivity rate:
Cherisse Halsall "The positivity rate was in the 30's and the high 20's for the better part of last month, now it's at about 12, what would you attribute these changes to, and do you think that the trend is going to continue moving downward?"
Melissa Diaz - Acting DHS "I think that the positivity rate from, if we go back to September, October we saw that it was at 20 to 25% consistently, it's only recently starting to go down but when you look at the overall the cumulative positivity rate that remains at 21% so it's the daily rate that keeps dropping to 18 of 15% which we are optimistic about but we are very cautious about as well. Ok, because there are many factors that can affect the positivity rate. So it's very important that we stay cautious with regards to the rate we're hoping that and as you quite rightly said, we're hoping that the public health measures along with improvement in testing rolling out the rapid tests doing more health education allowing persons to actually adhere to the public health measures, etc. All these things together will help us to reduce the number of cases that we see, so yes some measures I believe has made a big difference but also individual measures that we take for ourselves for our workplace those things will help us to continue to reduce the number of positive cases that we see."
