MANSFIELD — Richland County reported a record-high 87 COVID-19 current hospitalizations on Monday as the virus continued to spike around Ohio.
Richland Public Health educator Reed Richmond also said the county has reported 43 confirmed deaths due to the virus since the pandemic reached Ohio in March with an additional 13 deaths pending verification.
About one-third of those deaths have occurred since Nov. 1, according to the Ohio Deparatment of Health website.
Richland County was ranked 7th worst Monday among Ohio’s 88 counties in terms of COVID-19 occurrence with 1,264 new cases in the last two weeks, or 1,043.3 per 100,000 residents.
The county was rated “purple,” or level four, for the first time Thursday in the state’s color-coded public health advisory system, launched in July to monitor the spread of the virus.
Richmond said the county has recorded 4,627 cases since the pandemic reached Ohio in March with 313 total hospitalizations.
During a press briefing on Monday, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced there will likely be a one-day spike in COVID-19 numbers on Tuesday when the state includes a backlog of 12,600 positive antigen tests.
In the past, the Ohio Dept. of Health has verified these quicker, less-reliable tests before adding them to the statewide totals. State and local officials can no longer keep up with the rapidly rising case numbers, he said.
“The CDC changed their case definition in August, allowing antigen tests to be included in case counts without additional verification. However, here in Ohio, we continued to manually verify those exposures and symptoms before counting these tests as positive,” DeWine said.
“Our ODH and epidemiologist teams alerted us about three weeks ago that they are no longer able to keep up with the manual verification process for antigen tests because there is such widespread of the virus in the state,” DeWine said.
The governor said Ohio will align with the CDC’s current case definition starting Tuesday and will begin reflecting those tests moving forward.
“Tomorrow, we will clear those backlogged antigen tests, and they will be added to our reported case counts. That will result in a one-day spike in reported cases tomorrow. These cases will be assigned to their appropriate onset date,” he said.
“To be clear, all of these backlogged tests will not translate into new cases. They’ll be checked/duplicate records will be removed. We’ll also add these test results to our positivity calculation in the coming weeks,” DeWine said.
“We are now in a very dangerous stage. The vaccine is coming, but we know it will take a while to work our way through distribution,” he said.
Statewide, ODH reported 9,273 new daily virus infections and 63 more deaths Monday afternoon. The deaths pushed the state death toll over 7,000 since the pandemic began.
DeWine also said the three-week curfew between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. he implemented instituted Nov. 19 will be extended. Banning all but essential trips and work-related travel, the order is scheduled to expire on Thursday.
The governor also reported Monday that most of Ohio’s schools have transitioned to online education with the current spike. He said just 29 percent of the state’s 609 districts are doing full, in-person classes now. DeWine said 25 percent are doing a hybrid of in-person and online classes and 45 percent are fully remote.
Many of Richland County’s schools have gone to remote status, a number that increased with the “purple” designation.
There also appears to be another outbreak of COVID-19 in the two state prisons in Mansfield.
As of Sunday, 28 staff members and nine at the Mansfield Correctional Institution had current positive COVID-19 tests. Nine inmates were in isolation and 209 were in quarantine. Seven inmates have rest results pending.
At nearby Richland Correctional Institution, 10 staff members and one inmate had current positive tests. Two inmates were in isolation and 43 were in quarantine.
Quarantine separates and restricts the movement of people who were exposed, or potentially exposed, to a contagious disease to see if they become sick. Isolation separates sick people with a contagious disease from people who are not sick.
According to ODH, as of Dec. 2, there were 66 current cases of COVID-19 in Richland County nursing homes and assisted living centers, including Mansfield Memorial Homes (22 residents, 13 staff members), Lexington Court Care Center (13 residents, six staff) and Winchester Terrace Nursing Home (seven residents, five staff).
