Pandemic still active in county

The COVID-19 pandemic may have been on the down-low over the last few months, but it certainly isn’t gone. According to CEO Micki Lyons of the Crook County Medical Services District, the virus is still cropping up in the local community.

“We’ve seen some positive employees and also some positive in the community,” she told the board of trustees at last week’s regular meeting.

However, Lyons noted last week that this doesn’t seem to be having an impact on the community level system used by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to indicate the prevalence of COVID-19 in an individual county. On that system, she said, Crook County is still showing green, which means “low”.

Lyons told the board that she did some research into why this might be the case and believes she was able to uncover the answer. The community levels are based on weekly data; the better indicator for this county, she said, is community transmission, which is updated daily and looks at the difference in transmission rates from one day to the next.

On that metric, Lyons said, Crook County is still in the red. Consequently, the district is still performing testing of staff and residents of the long term care unit.

However, she stated that no changes have been made to visitation in the hospital. Also, she said, the COVID-19 cases have been relatively low impact.

“Anything that we have been seeing as far as COVID-19 has been mild,” she told the board. “We’ve had two pretty short hospitalizations and that’s about it”

While new deaths do continue to be reported regularly around the state, including five on June 21, Wyoming Department of Health data agrees that deaths from COVID-19 have slowed considerably. A total of 211 deaths have been recorded in Wyoming so far this year, compared to an all-time total of 1829.

Crook County has lost 29 people to COVID-19 throughout the pandemic, only six of which have died in 2022.

Similarly, case rates are demonstrably lower this year in Crook County. So far, 252 lab confirmed cases have been recorded in 2022, while the all-time total is 1046.

At this time, there are 464 confirmed active cases in Wyoming, three of which are in this county.