Worst week yet for COVID

Steele County experienced its worst week yet in the COVID-19 outbreak with 68 new cases reported over the past week, Public Health Director Amy Caron reported Monday.
To put things in perspective, the county typically averages 30 new cases a week, Caron said. There were 30 new cases alone over the weekend, bringing the county’s total to 657 cases with 4 hospitalized, 2 deaths and 553 recovered.
“We had a really rough week in Steele County,” said Caron with a tone of frustration in her voice. “We more than doubled.”
Things weren’t much better over in Dodge County where there were 47 new cases, bringing that county’s total to 338 with four people being hospitalized.
There have been 1,429 cases with seven deaths in Mower County and 590 cases with four deaths in Freeborn County. 
Caron said she believes this is the beginning of the fall surge that had been predicted several months ago. “I don’t think it’s going to help us with the cold weather and moving indoors,” she said.
Caron said it definitely appears we are headed into a second wave of the virus. Experts still have no idea how long the second wave will last. The driving factor of the second wave will be a vaccine, she said.
There were a couple of cluster cases over the past week involving groups all across the spectrum, including businesses and sports teams. Those affected were in the 6 to mid-70s age group. But she emphasized the majority of the cases continues to come from community spread where people are randomly picking up the virus from others.
So far there have been a few cases in the schools, Caron said. “There are some scattered cases in the schools, but nothing we would call an outbreak,” she said.
One trend that Public Health is noticing is that an increasing amount of people are asymptomatic where they are a carrier but have no symptoms.  
Caron said the asymptomatic cases typically originate from people having close contact to positive cases or where they were tested for other medical procedures and found to have the virus. They are also found in community testing events, but Caron noted there have not been any such events in Steele County to this point.
With the increase in cases, the county’s rate continues to climb. Steele County has moved from under 20 per 10,000 to the high 20s in just the past month. Caron said she is monitoring the trends closely with leaders in all the county’s schools. If the trend continues to go up, she will recommend schools move to a different learning model.
The next step for schools would be placing all grade levels in a hybrid model or hybrid in the elementary grades and distance learning in the high school. “The schools have some extremely hard decisions to make,” Caron said. “It’s really difficult to transition from one model to the next.”
Caron reminds people that the one line of defense right now is to get a flu shot. She also encourages people who come into contact with someone who has the virus to quarantine even if they don’t have symptoms. “I sympathize with people that are in quarantine for 14 days, but we are finding people who are carriers with no symptoms,” she said.
Added Caron, “This virus is a little smarter than us.”