ISDH: 650 more cases of COVID-19, 57 more deaths

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — On Tuesday morning, the Indiana State Department of Health announced 650 more cases of COVID-19 with 57 more deaths.

Currently, the state of Indiana has 16,588 total COVID-19 cases with 901 deaths related to the virus.

There have been 87,181 tests administered in the state of Indiana, according to the department.

ISDH has been providing daily updates here.

Officials in Indiana are not yet providing information on recoveries. Dr. Box has said that information will be available as soon as medical codes are created that will offer COVID-19 recovery information, which the state does not currently have.

According to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, there have been more than 3,062,000 confirmed cases worldwide, with more than 906,000 recoveries and more than 212,000 deaths.

In a Tuesday virtual press conference, Gov. Eric Holcomb and other state officials provided updates on the virus in Indiana.

• Dr. Lindsay Weaver, chief medical officer of the Indiana State Department of Health, gave an update on positive virus cases and testing in place of Indiana health commissioner Dr. Kris Box, who Holcomb said was not at the press conference due to a non-COVID-related family emergency.
• Weaver gave examples of ways that Hoosiers may have received invitations to be part of the state’s virus study to ensure residents saw that those postcards, emails, text messages or phone calls were legitimate. She encourage people who received invitations to register to provide more data for the study.
• The state has tested more than 87,000 people drive-thru clinics and with strike teams. The eligible groups for drive-thru had been symptomatic essential workers and their households, as well as symptomatic people with underlying conditions that make them high risk.
• As of Tuesday that testing expands. Over the next week, OptumServe will partner with the state to launch 20 testing sites for any Hoosier with virus symptoms, with a capacity to test 100,000 people in the first 30 days. The testing is also available for close contacts of people who have tested positive, or residents of congregant communities. In the next two weeks, the testing is set to expand to 50 sites around the state, Weaver said.
• Over the next week, 20 sites will open in Indiana National Guard armories, and each site will be open at least eights hours per day, Monday through Friday.
• People who want to be tested at these sites are encouraged to sign up online. A call-in line will also be available.
• To sign up online, users will self-report symptoms in the Optum online screening tool and register to be assigned an appointment date and time. That registration portal will open 48 before a testing site opens.
• No one will be charged for testing, and you do not have to have insurance to be tested. People who do have private insurance are asked to bring that information with them to the testing.
• Test results will be provided to the individual and to ISDH. People who test negative will receive a text or email. People who test positive will receive a phone call.
• With all sites open, up to 30,000 people will be able to be tested weekly, in addition to ongoing ISDH testing.
• “Everything that you’ve been doing to flatten the curve, to slow the spread, that’s why we find ourselves in a new position to make some decisions about how we go forward,” Holcomb said.
• “Your physical distancing has made quite a difference. … Our Friday plan will reflect that new normal,” Holcomb said. He said that plan would include “all the new ways that we just must safely live, work and play so that we can continue to experience this progress” in the state’s work to flight the virus.
• Holcomb said the state is focused on this question when looking at how to act next amid the spread of coronavirus: Is the health care system that we have overwhelmed?
• “It’s not just focusing on the positive cases. This could be with us, folks, for a year,” Holcomb said.
• He said the state was focused on not just one aspect, but did give laser focus to hospitalization rates and ventilator and ICU bed availability, all to ensure the state can continue to care for people without overloading the health care system.
• About a report that Simon Malls would reopen on Saturday, Holcomb says he has spoken to Simon Malls CEO David Simon. Holcomb says Simon weighed in, as the state asked businesses to do, but Simon does not know details of the contents of the state’s Friday announcements. He said that malls would be included in that Friday guidance.
• In response to a question about the constitutionality of the executive orders in Indiana, Holcomb said, “We’re confident that any action that I’ve taken has been constitutional and it’s been out of the necessity to ensure public health.”
• “It (the question) goes to our civil liberties, to our rights and freedoms, which are foundational for our country and to our way of life,” said Joe Heerens, general counsel for the governor.
• “Care has been taken from Day 1, from that very first executive order issued on March 6, by the governor and by our office, to craft the executive orders in a way that keeps them within the bounds of the law,” Heerens said.
• “We have to make sure that we protect our health care network, our health care system,” Holcomb said in response to a question about whether guidance would change if cases spiked again under more relaxed orders.
• About colleges and universities, Holcomb said the state has been in communication with them about how they could accommodate students and said more information on schools would be given Friday but decisions would likely be made later in May.
• When should people who tested positive but are no longer symptomatic be retested? “Retesting is actually not recommended on a regular basis,” Weaver said, because those tests often still come back positive a couple weeks later, but the tests don’t determine whether those people can still infect others.
• Weaver agreed with a CDC recommendation against people wearing gloves in public: “People aren’t trained on the proper use of gloves, so you would go and touch several surfaces and therefore continue to spread the virus around.”
• Weaver also said while in the grocery store or a similar place, she recommends putting your phone away so as not to touch items in a store and then touch your phone.
• People who are freelance workers and have applied for unemployment may see incomplete information when they log in because that information isn’t necessarily all processed yet, said Fred Payne with the Department of Workforce Development.
• A reporter asked why there was initially a low capacity of testing in Indiana compared to the rest of the Midwest, based on a map provided by the Department of Health and Human Services. “As of today, we’re still ahead of some of our neighbors in the Midwest area,” Weaver said. She said the factors that come into play are scarce resource: the labs available, whether they have the right machines and the right chemicals, the swab, the liquid.
• “When I say that we’re going to make our final decision Thursday night at midnight … We’re going to use all of our time to best be informed on Friday. We’re not going to try to short circuit it. We’re not going to try to cut corners. We’re going to use the newest information,” Holcomb said about whether certain regions — Lake County in particular — were ready to reopen. Positive cases are one factor in that equation, he said.
• “The ISDH strike team was able to go in and test all those people. When we go and do testing on site, we talk to them about what they can do or what we can do to better protect their employees. The state department of health is contacting all of those positive cases” to find out if they have everything they need to take care of themselves and to prepare those people for recovery, Weaver said about the cases at a Tyson processing plant in Cass County.
• Holcomb again said he does not have information to share about the Friday guidance and that a mall or store will look at the guidance and see if they can operate by it.
• Has Gov. Holcomb’s relationship with Pence benefited the state’s fight against the virus? “Our requests tend not to sit on the desk too long, so I would say yes. … I don’t want to assume any favoritism because” the administration has been constant contact with all the governors, Holcomb said.
• Weaver said OptumServe will provide all the supplies, including personal protective equipment and workers and will collect the swab specimens and manage the testing and reporting of results. The cost to the state at the time of the briefing was $17.9 million. Weaver said the hope was that a good portion of that cost would be covered by federal grants. It was not clear what span of time that testing cost covered.
• The locations of the additional 30 sites to be added will be based on hot spots and needs, and the testing will continue on a month-to-month basis, Weaver said.
• According to the governor’s office, about 4,400 more Hoosiers will be tested every day in the initial phase of Optum testing. And when all 50 sites are open, as many as 6,600 more Hoosiers can be tested per day.
• Holcomb said one reason they’re doing month-to-month is because new tests, new products may become available, and we don’t want to be tethered to older things when those become available.
• Weaver answered questions about the low number of cases and low amount of testing in Brown County, saying that she expected if testing were increased there, there would be more positive cases.
• “We all need to continue to act as if we currently have the virus and others around us have it, too, so every measure to do that social distancing and take all precautions is what is needed so that we don’t have that false sense of security,” Weaver said.
• Asked about whether cases of flu-like symptoms experienced in February at some Brown County schools, Weaver said the serology testing being done with IU Fairbanks could tell us something about cases in Indiana.
• What is the testing goal before reopening economy? “There are so many data points that go into” a decision like that, Weaver said. She said there isn’t an exact number, but the state is in constant contact with hospitals, health departments and health care providers.
• Holcomb said parts of the economy were already open, but that the other segments would reopen in multiple stages, through the summer.
• A reporter asked about the COVID-19 death count in Vigo County. She said the county was reporting four deaths, but the state was reporting five. Vigo County told her the fifth death did not have COVID-19 listed as the primary cause of death. Weaver said there is a delay to some reporting and that the “presumed death” area of the ISDH reporting includes people who did not test positive and that people who have COVID-19 listed as a condition, even if it is not the main cause of death, are included in the state’s totals.

Timeline of coronavirus in Indiana

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