COVID-19 deaths and cases continue to rise in the First State, but the numbers are a bit lower than anticipated to date.
State health officials report 2 more deaths and 165 new cases Tuesday.
The latest fatalities are an 83 year-old Sussex County woman who was in a long-term care facility and a 70 year-old Kent County woman who had been hospitalized.
Delaware has now seen 43 deaths related to the virus - 29 connected to long-term care facilities. The total number of lab-confirmed cases since March 11 is now 1,926.
Current hospitalizations in Delaware stand at 217 - up 13 from the 204 reported Monday. 45 people are critically ill.
The numbers of cases and hospitalizations lag behind the projections created by the models the state is using, but Gov. Carney warns against reading too much into that.
“The last couple of days doesn’t a trend create and so we’re going to be looking carefully at it,' said Carney at his Tuesday press briefing. "The fact that the positive cases aren’t what we thought they might be could be a function of testing. If we were doing more testing I’d have more confidence in the number being part of a trend.”
When it comes to hospitalizations, Carney notes the state has been projecting about 20 percent of positive cases would require it. Currently, the rate is just under 12 percent.
So we’ll be thinking about – in the future – adjusting that assumption to something less than 20 percent," said Carney. "That 20 percent came from kind of the worst-case scenario. I think it was the percentage that was being used in New York several weeks ago. And so we felt like have a conservative estimate on the high side was the best way to proceed."
Carney adds that even using the 20 percent projection, the state remains within its surge capacity at hospitals through April 20th.
319 Delawareans are considered recovered from COVID-19 - up from 277 Monday.
