Page last updated on September 7, 2021 at 1:45 pm
Hello, this is Mayor John Hamilton, update to the community on Monday, October 12th. Thanks all for checking in on this quick COVID update. So locally, here in the county and in the city, we continue to see positive numbers, in particular coming out of the vast majority of the testing done by Indiana University. The fourth week in a row of substantial continuing decline in all the major indicators. That's very positive and the basic message is thank you, thank you for continuing to do the work of staying masked, avoiding super spreader big gatherings of people, washing hands, physical distancing, et cetera. That seems to be working locally. We appreciate the collaboration of so many people on that.
We're not out of the woods, but four weeks of positive data is very encouraging to keep doing what we're doing. The big context of this is that the state is actually going in the opposite direction, and I'm pretty frustrated. The governor's loosening up while major indications in the state are that there's substantial wrong direction, in particular, for example, a couple of big numbers. The state seven-day average of positive cases of diagnoses is up more than 50% in the last month or so, going the absolutely wrong direction as the number of cases is significantly increasing. Also, from the state's database, you can see the hospitalization census for COVID patients similarly is up about 50% over the last several weeks.
So at the statewide level, we're seeing really the wrong direction happening as you read the news about the rest of the country and also entering the flu season. So we're going to keep, I hope and I will be urging, keep doing what we're doing locally to see the numbers go in the opposite direction of the state. It does concern us that we're this island of improving in a state where a lot of things are going in the wrong direction. We're going to keep talking about that, but thank you for continuing to do what you do. That's the main message of this week. Halloween's going to be different. You'll hear more about that coming up. But we're basically urging everyone to follow the CDC guidelines to avoid problems. But we're going to stay the course, I hope, and we'll urge that with continuing to have tighter controls here locally because they seem to be working. Thanks for all you're doing. Please get in touch if you have any questions.
