Parish COVID-19 cases still climbing

Confirmed cases of COVID-19 took another jump in Lincoln Parish on Friday.

Figures released by the Louisiana Department of Health at midday Friday showed the parish with 401 known cases of the potentially fatal respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus.

That’s an 18-case jump over Thursday’s count, and a 57-case jump over the week. However, the 57 cases does not necessarily mean 57 separate people. Patients with CO-VID-19 who are retested and still positive for the virus could also be in the number.

LDH does not break down new cases versus retests.

Parish Director of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness Kip Franklin said his calculations show there may be approximately 150 active cases of COVID-19 in the parish.

Franklin said he looked back one month — from June 11 to July 9 — presuming everyone diagnosed with the virus prior to that has either recovered or are among the 19 parish residents who’ve died from COVID-19.

All of the cases since then, minus duplicate tests, may be still positive, he said.

Meantime, the jump in the parish total arises out of 8,258 swab tests. That equals an approximate 4.85% positivity rate. Both numbers are cumulative, meaning they date back to when statistics began being kept in March.

Statewide, Louisiana stood at 74,636 cases of COVID-19 as of Friday. The 2,642 new confirmed cases is the largest single daily increase not attributable to the testing backlog since the COVID-19 outbreak began, LDH said.

Louisiana’s total number of cases come out of 905,248 tests, for a positivity rate of 8.24%.

According to Johns Hopkins University, the nationwide positivity rate, which peaked at almost 22% in early April, is roughly 8.4% over the past week.