COVID case rates in Cobb County have fallen by roughly a half from what they were in late December and early January at the start of the Omicron surge.
As of Wednesday, Cobb and Douglas Public Health said Tuesday that the 14-day average of cases per 100,000 people was 1,075, after peaking at nearly 2,000 around the first of the year.
“That’s definitely some good news, and we are we are heading in the right direction,” CDPH director Dr. Janet Memark told the Cobb Board of Commissioners Tuesday.
But that number, she added, “is still very high.”
The “high” community spread threshold is 100/100K.
The death rate in Cobb also is starting to fall, according to the Georgia Department of Public Health daily COVID status report.
According to date of death figures, the peak was nine deaths on Jan. 14, when the 7-day moving average was nearly five a day. Eight more deaths were reported on Jan. 19. As of Jan. 24, the 7-day moving average is 2.1 deaths per day.
There have been 1,470 confirmed COVID deaths in Cobb since the pandemic was declared in March 2020.
The positivity rate in Cobb for PCR tests also remains high at 17.3 percent (5 percent is considered the high threshold for that metric), but that figure has gone down substantially, from around 30 percent at the Omicron peak.
While Wellstar Kennestone Hospital is off its overall peak, Memark said “we still have a lot of patients in the hospital with COVID-19” and the majority of them are not unvaccinated.
She didn’t provide specifics in her briefing to the commissioners.
As she has done during the pandemic, Memark urged members of the public to wear masks (“the best fitting that you can find”) when going out in the public, and to be vaccinated and boosted.
In Cobb County, the rate for fully vaccinated people is 60 percent, with 65 percent having had one dose. Those fully vaccinated and boosted are 43 percent.
Those figures come from the Georgia Department of Public Health, which has a vaccine dashboard here.
You can watch the rest of Tuesday’s CDPH presentation below.
Related posts:
- Cobb Commission Chairwoman tests positive for COVID
- Cobb COVID emergency declaration extended into February
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