Avoyelles COVID for Thursday: 10 cases, 167 tests

Like a nasty summer cold that just hangs on no matter how hard you try to shake it, the COVID-19 pandemic refuses to give up the ghost in Avoyelles Parish.

The Thursday report saw the number of tests rise to well over 100, but there was also a similar rise in new cases. Recent reports have been unnervingly consistent in posting positive rates in the 6-7 percent range over the past week. Unless those rates are adjusted by the state, the parish is likely to see a jump in its official positive rate for the seven-day period of May 20-26, which will be released on June 2. The current positive rate, for May 13-19, is 3.4 percent.

Thursday's report from the state health department looked at 167 tests with a net of 10 new cases. There were 160 lab tests with 11 positive results. There were only seven rapid result tests and the state subtracted one previously posted positive from the parish's pandemic total. After the dust clears, that means the parish had a 6.8 percent positive rate in the tests the state uses to determine the official weekly positive rate.

The parish's pandemic total as of Thursday was 4,282 cases (3,721 / 561) and 123 deaths (115 / 8). The state's totals were 470,331 cases and 10,570 deaths since March 2020.

While the state currently considers Avoyelles at "moderate" risk, based on numbers that may be a few days old, the online COVID Act Now website upgraded the parish's status to "high" in its Thursday update. That designation is based on a new cases-per-day-per-100,000 pop. rate of 10.3, 38th highest out of 64 parishes, an infection rate of 0.83 (55th in the state), a positive test rate of 5.2 percent (17th highest) and 27.2 percent of population with at least one dose of vaccine (40th in the state).

The state average is 8.6 new cases, 1.00 infection rate, 3.5 percent positive rate and 35.3 percent with at least one shot of vaccine.

An infection rate of 1.00 means the number of active cases is remaining about the same. A rate over 1.00 indicates the number of cases is rising and a rate under 1.00 indicates the number of infections is shrinking.

In looking at the new cases per 100,000 number, those in Avoyelles should remember that every one new case in Avoyelles would be counted as 2.5 cases to obtain that number because Avoyelles has a population of 40,000. That would mean 10 new cases would become 25 in that comparison. The highest per-day rates over a week period, according to Act Now's report, are East Feliciana (26.9%), Cameron (26.3%) and West Feliciana (23.6%).