COVID cases trend downwards three weeks in a row in El Paso County

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KKTV) - For the third week in a row, El Paso County Health is reporting fewer COVID-19 cases.

Tuesday, the El Paso County COVID-19 Dashboard is showing a seven-day incident rate of 394.9 per 100,000. As of Jan. 31, the incident rate was 818 per 100,000 people. When you compare this week to last week, the cases have been cut by almost half.

Chief Medical Officer Dr. David Steinbruner from UCHealth tells 11 News cases are decreasing within their hospitals. According to UCHealth’s COVID-19 Dashboard, there are 276 cases as of Monday. Just one week earlier, there were 343 cases. This is a drop of 70 cases throughout all 12 of their hospitals. Steinbruner believes the worst of this wave of the pandemic has come and gone.

“I certainly hope that we will continue to see that downward trend,” said Steinbruner. “Everybody is crossing our fingers and trying to look over the horizon to see what the future holds. I think we’ve seen right now the worst of the omicron spike that’s coming down.”

Dr. Richard Vu tells 11 News he is seeing a downward trend within his practice at Matthews-Vu Medical Group. Vu says this decrease comes from a combination of people that have received the vaccination and those that have either had COVID-19 or have been exposed to it.

Vu tells 11 News his concerns comes from the uncertainties with the sub-variant of Omicron. This is known as BA-2. There is not much information out about it as of now, but if it ends up being more transmissible or virulent, this could cause cases to peak.

Vu tells 11 News the vaccine and booster continues to be the best form of protection against all variants. He says parents with children under 5 should still be cautious since they cannot receive the vaccine yet.

“The good thing is that kids between 6 months to 5 years of age have a strong immunity,” said Vu. “They have strong immunity and they seem to have less severe symptoms when they get COVID. The problem is if they get COVID, then they can spread it to other people.”

Vu and Steinbruner tell 11 News along with getting the vaccine and booster, people should continue to wear masks, wash their hands and social distance. Vu believes we can get back to normalcy sometime this year if we continue to follow preventive measures.

Copyright 2022 KKTV. All rights reserved.