COURT HOUSE – Each day, the Cape May County Health Department provides counts of new COVID-19 cases, broken down by community-based residents, those in long-term care facilities, and non-residents.
The reports also show how many of those cases are active and how many represent individuals who were removed from quarantine. The reports are also a reminder of the toll the disease has taken, in terms of COVID-19-related fatalities.
The county doesn’t have more than that, but those numbers are provided every afternoon. The picture those numbers paint for this past week is one of a stable contagion, characterized by incremental growth in the spread of the disease.
The week since Aug. 4 saw 40 new cases, a continued decline from the previous week, which saw 48. Both of these weeks represented a drop from three weeks ago when the county had 70 new cases of residents and non-residents combined. The new case count is continuing to decline.
Another positive aspect of the reports for the past week is that there were no new confirmed fatalities caused by COVID-19.
Since the county’s first confirmed case March 18, the daily reports added to 1,012 confirmed cases among county residents and 306 among non-residents.
Those numbers might give greater pause if not for the fact that two-thirds of all resident cases were prior to June 1. April and May provided the majority of today’s cumulative total.
Better news still is that 88% of the cumulative 1,012 resident COVID-19 confirmed cases are recovered and off quarantine, as of Aug. 10. The active case count, on this day, for county residents, is 44 cases, about 4% of the total.
Among the 306 reported cases among non-residents, only 10%, 30 individuals, remain active, and some of those are not completing their quarantines in the county. Even with crowds that swell the county’s population, the numbers are trending down.
Health officials continue to urge appropriate protocols to protect against the spread. Many individuals in the county are heeding that advice.
The state still restricts indoor activities from dining to movies and has lowered the maximum number of individuals who can participate in an indoor activity.
The virus is still here, but the county is doing better than many other areas, in terms of the basics of new case growth.
In August, the county added 59 new resident and non-resident cases and took a combined 147 previously active individuals off quarantine.
Following a precipitous rise in the COVID-19 transmission rate, a key health metric, the state announced Aug. 10 that the transmission rate is once more down below one. If it stays in that range, each new infection will spread to less than one additional case, further slowing the contagion.
This has been a good week for Cape May County’s numbers, coming just as the public got to see plans for school reopenings, and has many school districts holding virtual town halls to explain procedures and options to anxious parents and students.
The good news is that the active case count among county residents is lower Aug. 10 than it was since the start of April. That doesn’t mean the danger has passed. It means that Cape May County is in a better place than many other areas across the nation.
To contact Vince Conti, email vconti@cmcherald.com.
Cape May – Governor Murphy says he doesn't know anything about the drones and doesn't know what they are doing but he does know that they are not dangerous. Does anyone feel better now?
