'Catch up' Tuesday sees 41 new cases, another death for Avoyelles Parish

As predicted, "No Show" Monday was followed by "Catch Up" Tuesday when the state health department released the one-day update for COVID-19 in Avoyelles Parish.

The total number of new cases was a flash back to July -- 41 since Monday's report. There was also an additional death. Of those 41, 25 were positive results out of 649 molecular tests, considered "confirmed" under the Health Department's current terminology. That was a one-day positive rate of 3.8 percent for those tests. The other 16 cases were in 79 rapid diagnosis tests (RDT), with a positive rate of 20.2 percent. State health officials have said the weekly positive rate for parishes, reported every Wednesday, does not include the RDT results. Those results are not considered to be as reliable as the lab tests.

There are those who are concerned excluding those results could give a false picture of COVID's presence. It has been noted that RDTs are usually given to people who are experiencing some symptoms that could be associated with COVID. It would then be likely that their results would have a higher positive rate than the tests given to a more widespread population. National health officials are advocating more widespread use of the RDTs to cast a broader net to catch asymptomatic carriers of COVID who do not realize they are contagious and thus endanger all with whom they come in contact. The reason the rapid result tests are still considered "probable" for COVID is because of a higher rate of false positives than the more detailed and more time-consuming test.

As of Tuesday, Avoyelles has had 2,508 cases of COVID since the first case was identified on March 21. Of those, 2,340 are "confirmed" and 168 are "probable." There have been 84 COVID-related deaths -- 81 "confirmed" by molecular tests and three that were diagnosed with the rapid result antigen tests -- since the parish suffered its first virus-related fatality on March 31.

The state totals are 290,960 cases (266,953 / 24,007) and 7,158 deaths (6,813 / 345).

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