Positive cases in Monroe County are on the upswing after health officials reported 60 more on Friday, making it the highest increase of new cases since early February.
READ MORE: COVID-19 Cases In Monroe County Up, But Positivity Rate Declines To 4.4%
As of Aug. 25, there 54 people hospitalized in the IU Health South Central region, which includes Bloomington, Bedford and Paoli.
"Our clinics and emergency departments across communities are seeing an overwhelming number of individuals," said regional president Brian Shockney.
Shockney said of those 54 individuals, 45 are unvaccinated with 12 receiving treatment in the ICU and 5 on ventilators.
"We just began dialing back our surgeries so we could make room for beds for [COVID] patients. It allows us now to have more beds that surgical patients would’ve been using," Shockney said.
READ MORE: IU Health To Suspend Half Of Elective Procedures Amid COVID Surge
County health administrator Penny Caudill said the risk for community spread is high and she is most concerned with the number of cases per 100,000 residents, which according to the state's COVID-19 Dashboard, is 128 cases.
"There’s not one single metric or piece of information that we can use. We have to look at the whole picture," Caudill said.
She said the county's disparity between positive cases and the positivity rate is due to more IU students getting tested and those results mixing into the local data.
For those reasons, local health officials will continue to keep the mask mandate in place until cases begin to balance out and more residents become fully vaccinated.
