State officials remain concerned a post-holiday COVID surge could be coming to Delaware.
The state’s numbers have seen some leveling off after jumping after Thanksgiving.
Hospitalizations were at 431 Monday with 56 people considered to be in critical condition.
State health officials also announced 771 new positive cases Monday. That pushed the 7-day average for new cases over 700 again to nearly 704.
And Gov. John Carney says the concern is they could move even higher in the wake of the holiday season.
“Our hope and our prayer now is that we don’t see an additional surge on top of this," said Carney Tuesday. "You can see things flattening out there for a number of days and our hope is that will continue. We don’t know that that’s going to be the case, and we might have a continued spike up as a result of the positive cases that result from the Christmas and New Years holidays .”
Carney says the average of positive tests is also troubling.
“So, our percent positives are still really at an unacceptably high level. The one that we’re really focused on is the percent of the tests that are positive – right around 10 percent now," said Carney. "We want to actually be below 5 percent and we’ve been below 10 percent, around 9 percent, over the last several weeks.”
Delaware has now exceeded 61,000 total COVID-19 cases since the pandemic begin, reaching 61,100 Monday.
The state also announced 10 new deaths from COVID-19, bringing the total death toll to 947. All 10 victims were over 55 years old and had underlying health conditions. Three were long-term care facility residents.
