The number of COVID-19 cases across Daviess County has dropped steadily and things are moving in the right direction, Green River District Health Department Director Clay Horton said Tuesday. He primarily attributed that number of vaccinations, saying that nearly 55,000 doses have been administered across the county.
Horton noted that Daviess County’s incidence rate wasn’t quite low enough yet to get to the yellow category of fewer than 10 new cases per 100,000 people, but it has gotten close in recent days — it was 11.1 as of Tuesday night.
As for the decreasing number of new infections, hospitalizations and deaths, Horton credited residents for being proactive in doing the right thing, but he said it all came down to vaccinations.
“We have a lot of people that are getting vaccinated, and we need everyone to continue with that,” he noted. “The demand for vaccinations is still high, but we’ve noticed it’s lessening some.”
As of Monday, the number of vaccinations administered locally totaled 54,893. Horton said that included vaccinations from all medical providers across the area.
Horton said 400 people have received the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The rest have had at least their initial dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines.
“Vaccinations are going well. Our processes are working well,” he said. “I’m getting good feedback from those who are using our sites, the hospital’s sites, and other sites as well.”
Getting back to a sense of normal wasn’t going to be a binary change, he added, but Daviess County was making progress and “moving in the right direction.”
Horton said nursing home outbreaks had “drastically” gone down since vaccinations were made available. In fact, two of the health department’s contact tracers had to be reassigned to other facilities because the number of cases in nursing homes had dipped so low.
“There were vast differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated symptoms,” Horton said of the cases he’s seen since the vaccine rollout. “Most of those who’d been vaccinated didn’t have symptoms, or had very, very mild symptoms.”
Horton said Daviess County’s number of COVID-19 cases initially peaked higher than the state’s average, and that it also decreased slower as well. In recent weeks, however, things had turned around. Daviess County’s infection rate was currently lower than the state’s average, he said.
“It is leveling off,” he said. “If we can continue moving in the same direction and driving the numbers down a little bit lower, that’s going to put our community in a really good place.”
