MUNCIE, Ind. — The Delaware County commissioners met for an emergency meeting on Friday after Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb announced his plan to reopen the state gradually, …
MUNCIE, Ind. — The Delaware County commissioners met for an emergency meeting on Friday after Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb announced his plan to reopen the state gradually, a plan the county intends to follow nearly verbatim.
Delaware County Health Department’s administrator Jammie Bane said Friday afternoon he was looking over the governor’s just-released guidelines to give a better opinion on how they might affect the local community, but he didn’t see any major cause for concern.
The Delaware County commissioners wanted to know if the recent rise in COVID-19 cases locally could be attributed to healthcare facilities including nursing homes, though that exact information was not available during Friday’s meeting.
Donna Wilkins, the Delaware County Health officer, said that issue was still the largest concern for the community. If the virus began devastating local nursing home facilities, that would be the worst case scenario for health officials..
Delaware County was nearing 200 confirmed coronavirus cases as of Friday.
Local health officials with the Delaware County Health Department reported on Friday that there was one new coronavirus-related death and 14 additional cases confirmed.
That brings the local total 199 confirmed cases and 18 attributed deaths.
The 14 most recently confirmed cases being reported since Thursday’s press release include:
The one new death was a previously identified and confirmed COVID-19 patient. No additional information about the patients will be released at this time due to privacy laws.
Positive case numbers are likely to rise over the coming weeks as testing becomes far more prevalent across the state, according to health officials, but other measures will be used by the state to track how the reopening is going.
Holcomb has used data to drive decisions since the state’s first case of the novel coronavirus in early March, and said Friday he will continue to do so as the state contemplates a sector-by-sector reopening.
