BY JUSTIN SABATA
Active COVID-19 cases in Ellis County have decreased in the past week. Last Wednesday, the Ellis County Health Department reported 229 active cases. Currently, there are 162 cases being monitored by the department.
Active hospitalizations have gone up from three to eight due in part to an outbreak at a long-term care facility in Hays, according to Ellis County Director of Health Services Jason Kennedy.
Kennedy also reported on the decline in seven-day case growth during Monday’s Ellis County Commission meeting.
“The good thing about being on the downslope is, like we’ve talked before, this is kind of indicative of decisions that were made a week, two weeks ago, things like that,” Kennedy said. “We did have the holiday weekend (Labor Day) in there that was somewhat concerning. We hope to continue this trend down and not see a return.”
Since this meeting, the weekly percent-of-positives has risen from 14.7% to 16.1%, meaning that active cases have still decreased but the percentage of administered tests reporting back positive has increased.
Fort Hays State University published a campus COVID-19 update from September 5 to September 11. Updates are provided once a week as part of FHSU’s COVID Response. Last week, 19 tests were administered with eight positive tests according to the COVID-19 Dashboard. Ten students were also quarantined on-campus.
The Ellis County Commission will meet this Monday at 5 p.m. at the Administrative Center in Hays. This will be the final meeting for the month of September and can be viewed on the county’s Facebook and YouTube pages.