ST. LOUIS — The number of COVID-19 cases in Missouri swelled past 50,000 on Friday as city and county leaders expressed concern with ongoing testing delays.
The state added 1,489 new cases, bringing the overall total since the start of the pandemic to 50,323. State health officials reported another 10 deaths, pushing the total number to 1,233.
St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson said Friday that a lag in testing is obscuring the picture of cases in the city and the country.
Of 1,218 positive results reported to the city in the last two weeks, more than half were over two weeks old, Krewson said.
“That is the real difficulty in trying to figure out exactly what is happening day-to-day,” she said.
The city marked its highest single-day increase in cases Thursday, adding 175 because of a dump of test results from a national lab that is facing significant backlogs, Krewson said.
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The mayor added that in light of delayed results, she’s been relying more on hospitalization figures to get a picture of the virus’ spread.
Hospital admissions in the St. Louis area are up this month, hitting 354 confirmed and suspected COVID-19 patients by Friday, compared with around 240 in late June, according to the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force, a coalition of the metro area’s major hospitals.
Note from St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force: The data includes patients at BJC HealthCare, SSM Health and St. Luke's Hospital. As of Jan. 17, 2022, the data includes patients at the VA St. Louis Healthcare System.
But while the number of hospital patients is up, the most serious cases are remaining steady, hovering around 60 people in area intensive care units and about 25 to 30 on ventilators, according to task force counts.
Younger people hospitalized
A key to that change is that people younger than 40 are making up a larger number of hospitalizations and are less likely to have complications, Dr. Alex Garza, head of the task force, said in a briefing Friday.
That change is also fueled by improved treatments and a falling number of admissions from people living in nursing homes, Garza said.
Long-term care residents now make up about 4% of hospitalizations compared with more than 50% earlier this spring, he said.
Garza also addressed the issue of testing backlogs but said preventive strategies like wearing a mask and limiting gatherings was the solution.
“We’re not going to test our way out of this pandemic,” he said. “As everybody knows, we’re overloaded with the number we can test, but the best way to cure that is to get our cases down.”
St. Louis County Executive Sam Page continued to express concern with testing delays and also with one solution some providers have landed on to get quicker results for people with symptoms.
Rapid tests, which can get results in fewer than 30 minutes, are making up a significant portion of tests in the county, according to the county health department.
Page raised concerns with the tests Friday, noting that research has said that they can reach false negatives as high as 20% to 30% of the time.
“If you have symptoms and you have a rapid negative test, that test might not be reliable,” Page said, suggesting that people in that category should get re-tested with the traditional nasal test.
New virus restrictions were set to go into effect Friday, including a bar curfew of 10 p.m., gathering limits of 50 people and business capacity limits lowered to 25% from 50%.
Schools and medical facilities will be exempt from the capacity rule, but religious institutions need to remain at 25% capacity beginning this weekend, Page said.
There have been outbreaks tracked to churches in Missouri, including a report Friday of at least 30 cases connected to Old Paths Baptist Church outside Kansas City.
About 300 people were exposed to the virus at the church between July 19 and July 24, the Jackson County Health Department said in a statement Friday.
Cases rise in Illinois
Across the Mississippi River, Illinois added 1,941 cases for an overall total of 178,837. There are now at least 7,495 people who have died.
Illinois, which is about double the population of Missouri, is averaging less than 4% of COVID-19 tests coming back positive. The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services was reporting a 9.7% positivity rate.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker this week warned that Metro East communities have among the highest positivity rates in the state and could soon see more restrictions.
About 7.8% of tests were coming back positive, Pritzker said at a Wednesday news conference. Three consecutive days with an 8% rate or above will prompt new restrictions, according to the state’s reopening plan.
“Residents should hold your elected leaders accountable,” Pritzker said Wednesday. “Demand that they take action because if they don’t, they could bring the entire region back to closed bars and closed restaurants, stricter limits on gatherings or even another stay-at-home order.”
East St. Louis Mayor Robert Eastern III, who himself tested positive for COVID-19 earlier in July, was among the first leaders in the Metro East to impose local restrictions.
Eastern earlier in the week required businesses to close to walk-in customers by 10 p.m. Drive-thru and carry-out operations can continue past that time.
These maps and charts show the spread of COVID-19 in Missouri and Illinois.
Note from Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services: Note: Due to an abrupt change in data measures and the reporting platform issued by the White House on Monday, July 13, and effective Wednesday, July 15, Missouri Hospital Association (MHA) and the State of Missouri were unable to access hospitalization data during the transition. .
NOTE: On Thursday, Nov. 18, 2021, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) changed how it reports COVID-19 cases and deaths. The department began counting reinfections as new cases, and added epidemiologically linked cases to its counts.
On April 17, 2021, DHSS adjusted a database error that was causing individuals with both a positive PCR and antigen result to be counted as both a probable and confirmed case. This correction removed 11,454 cases that were counted twice in previous probable antigen cases, according the notation. That date's data has been removed from this display.
Beginning March 8, 2021, DHSS began posting county-level data showing "probable" COVID-19 cases detected by antigen testing. Using the historical data from the DHSS dashboard, we reconfigured this graph to include that number in the total.
Missouri updated its data dashboard on Sept. 28. 2020, to delete duplicate cases. This resulted in a decrease of total cases which caused the daily count to reflect a negative number. That date's data has been removed from this display.
NOTE: On Thursday, Nov. 18, 2021, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) changed how it reports COVID-19 cases and deaths. The department began counting reinfections as new cases, and added epidemiologically linked cases to its counts.
On April 17, 2021, DHSS adjusted a database error that was causing individuals with both a positive PCR and antigen result to be counted as both a probable and confirmed case. This correction removed 11,454 cases that were counted twice in previous probable antigen cases, according the notation.
Beginning March 8, 2021, DHSS began posting county-level data showing "probable" COVID-19 cases detected by antigen testing. Using the historical data from the DHSS dashboard, we reconfigured this graph to include that number in the total.
Missouri updated its data dashboard on Sept. 28. 2020, to delete duplicate cases. This resulted in a decrease of total cases which caused the daily count to reflect a negative number.
Note from Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services: The discrepancy in the number of deaths on July 19, 2020, was due a duplicate record being discovered by the Missouri DHSS.