Thirty-four new cases of COVID-19 have been identified in Worcester, city officials said Thursday, noting that hospitalizations for the virus continue to trend down in the area.
However, the city also reported hundreds of cases of COVID-19 that were previously unreported. City Manager Edward Augustus Jr. said these cases are not new this week, but were not previously reported because of discrepancies with the reporting system.
Augustus said there are 656 cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, that had not been reported before in Worcester. Those cases accumulated because of issues with the reporting system. For example, Augustus said if a person in a long-term care facility initially tested negative and then tested positive later, that could have led to the case not being reported before. Or, discrepancies with someone’s address could have been a reason for cases going unreported. False negatives could have also caused some unreported cases.
The city manager said he did not want people to be alarmed by the increase in cases and noted that since May 1, Worcester has 146 fewer coronavirus patients in the hospital system and 61 fewer in intensive care unit beds.
Dr. Michael Hirsh, the medical director for the city’s public health department, said that many of the 656 previously unreported cases are people who got sick in March or April. Some of those cases may include people who have died.
Hirsh said those unreported cases did receive contact tracing from the state.
Counting the 34 new cases since Wednesday and the 656 previously unreported cases, Worcester now has seen a total of 4,949 cases of the virus.
At Saint Vincent Hosptial and the UMass Memorial Health Care system combined, there are 138 inpatients with coronavirus on Thursday, a decrease of six from Wednesday. Of those patients, 46 are in the intensive care unit, which is two fewer than Wednesday, Augustus said.
A total of 295 people have died at the hospitals from coronavirus, three more since Wednesday, the manager said.
The systems have seen 340 employees test positive for the virus.
At the Beaumont Rehabilitation and Skilled Nursing Center, which is treating people with coronavirus, there are 53 patients, with one admission and six discharges, Augustus said.
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