Health reports show signs of COVID peak waning in Floyd County

♦ So far, January has been the second deadliest month for the virus locally.

Public health reports show indications that a deadly holiday COVID-19 peak may be waning in Floyd County.

The number of new cases appears to be consistently dropping, albeit slowly. The number of new infections within the past two weeks is now just above 600. While that’s still high compared with most of 2020, post-thanksgiving peaks measured in the high 700s.

The unfortunate reality is that a glut of new infections eventually leads to more people hospitalized and then an increase in deaths.

November through December brought the highest infection rates the county has seen since the beginning of the pandemic. That led to record hospitalizations locally, which have only partially subsided.

As of Thursday, Floyd Medical Center and Redmond Regional Medical Center each reported just above 50 COVID-19 positive patients. During December and through much of January, those numbers were often in the 70 to 80 range at each hospital.

Those two months were also the deadliest for Floyd County.

There were 33 deaths in December and, so far, there have been 29 deaths in January — three of which were reported on Thursday. Up to this point, 138 Floyd County residents have died from COVID-19, but that number is likely low. The Department of Public Health lists an additional 22 deaths suspected to have resulted from a COVID-19 infection.

Nationally, new cases have dropped 21% from the prior week, according to Department of Health and Human Services data. However, it will likely take weeks for those corresponding declines in hospitalization and deaths to arrive, and the battle against the virus rages on at record levels in many places across the country.

The Associated Press reported that the U.S. continues to log approximately 3,000 deaths per day from COVID-19.

Eva Lee, a mathematician and engineering professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, works on models predicting COVID-19 patterns. She told Kaiser Health News that the decline reflects the natural course of the virus as it infects a social web of people, exhausts that cluster, dies down and then emerges in new groups.

The vaccination rollout in Georgia remains sluggish, and public health officials expect shipments to remain sporadic until April.

According to the Department of Public Health, the state has received all of its 1,322,000 allocation of doses, a combination of the vaccines produces by Pfizer and Moderna.

Of that number, as of Thursday, 836,518 doses have been administered.