The coronavirus outbreak in Elkhart County, Ind., is once again designated as red, the most severe of the state’s advisory levels.
The weekly score was adjusted to orange a week ago but bounced back to red Wednesday, as the positivity rate for all tests in the county is again above 15 percent, at 16.3 percent.
The other indicator used to decide a county’s color level is the number of weekly infections per 100,000, of which the county had 311, over 50 percent more than the 200 required for a county to be considered red.
Wednesday’s change in the color code will not result in any changes to the restrictions in effect in Elkhart County, since the county was orange for only a week, while the state requires that a county be at a lower level for two weeks before regulations can be loosened. Among the restrictions still in place are the mask mandate and the limit of 25 people at gatherings.
Click here to read the full story from Rasmus S. Jorgensen in the Elkhart Truth.
Elkhart County’s seven-day average for new infections was 84 per day as of Tuesday, down from 97 a week earlier. The Indiana State Department of Health reports 55 COVID-19 deaths in the county in the last 30 days.
COVID-19 hospitalizations decreased in the past week at Elkhart General Hospital, where the number of COVID-19 inpatients went from 45 to 37. The number of COVID-19 inpatients at Goshen Hospital was 19 as of Wednesday, up from 18 a week earlier.
