Rhode Island’s coronavirus death toll passes 2,500

PROVIDENCE (AP) — The number of Rhode Islanders who have died after contracting COVID-19 has passed the 2,500 mark, according to state Department of Health numbers released Friday.

With six more virus-related fatalities Thursday, the state’s death toll is now 2,502.

The state also reported 437 new confirmed cases of the disease, 399 who tested positive Thursday and the remainder who tested positive on previous days, pushing the number of known cases in the state to nearly 126,000.

Thursday’s positivity rate was just over 2%.

The number of people in the state’s hospitals with the disease as of Wednesday, the latest day for which the information is available, was 168, up slightly from the previous day.

The latest seven-day average positivity rate in Rhode Island is 2.03%. State health departments are calculating positivity rate differently across the country, but for Rhode Island the AP calculates the rate by dividing new cases by test encounters using data from The COVID Tracking Project.

The seven-day rolling average of daily new cases in Rhode Island has decreased over the past two weeks, going from about 441 on Feb. 11 to 332 on Thursday, according to The COVID Tracking Project.