As of 9:30 a.m., April 29, 2020
- Wyoming: Confirmed cases of COVID-19: 396. Deaths: 7 — Recovered: 362. Probable, untested cases: 140.
- By county: Fremont County leads the state with 101 confirmed cases, followed by Laramie with 92, Teton with 65, Natrona with 39 and Campbell with 14. Two counties, Platte and Weston, have reported no cases.
- Testing: 9,077 tests have been administered and processed, according to the Wyoming Department of Health. Fremont County health officials recently expanded testing and contact tracing there, which they say likely accounts for the county’s spike in confirmed cases.
- United States: 1,014,468 confirmed cases, according to the Johns Hopkins Institute. Total deaths: 58,471 — Total recoveries: 115,936.
- The latest: The state will begin easing restrictions on certain businesses Friday, Gov. Mark Gordon announced Tuesday. The new public health orders will allow gyms, barber shops, hair salons and other personal care services to reopen under specific operating criteria. Other parts of the state’s plan involve easing restrictions on day care providers and allowing hospitals to resume elective surgeries. The state’s order that limits public gatherings to 10 people or fewer, meanwhile, has been extended through May 15. With a positive testing rate of about 4% — and 12 individuals currently hospitalized with the virus, Gordon said, the state “is doing pretty well.” However, he said, “COVID isn’t going away. … It is important not to jeopardize the progress we have made.” State Health Officer Dr. Alexia Harrist stressed the importance of wearing face masks in public settings like grocery stores, retail outlets and personal service businesses. “If everybody wears face coverings in the settings I discussed, that will help all of us be more successful in reducing transmission,” she said.
- More news: Since the pandemic hit Wyoming, workers in the state have received more than $42 million in unemployment insurance benefits from a combination of federal emergency aid and the state’s unemployment insurance fund, according to the Department of Workforce Services. In Teton County, which has been among the state’s hot spots, the number of active cases has dropped significantly, according to the Teton County Emergency Management Agency’s dashboard. Of the 99 cases the county has reported, 88 have recovered.
Why are we not using this C19 diapause to do a whole lot more potentially valuable data collection? Just as environmental scientists have been capitalizing on this rare opportunity to double check their climate hypotheses in real time in a global petri dish; we in Wyoming also have a unique and I would argue ethical obligation to use our blessings/anomalies to further the collective advantage of our species. Example: We have two counties (Platte and Weston) in Wyoming that still have not reported a single case of C19. What could we learn by taking a statistically significant random sample of IgM and IgG antibodies from a cohort like Weston County? What is really happening in this location with this virus that is so markedly different from literally everywhere else? Is it geographic isolation? Lack of cultural diversity or possibly just the right population density? So called ” herd immunity”? or simply just a bad case of suboptimal testing and reporting? One overarching theme with this “pandemic” has been that absolutely nothing really turns out to be as it initially appears . If nothing else maybe we could finally establish a credible quantifiable scientific baseline here that better explains how this thing races through a population from the starting gun………… to the finish line………. Just some food for thought