BISMARCK — The North Dakota Department of Health on Wednesday, July 22, announced a single-day record of 160 new cases of COVID-19.
There are now 864 North Dakotans known to be infected with the virus, marking the highest point of the pandemic and one of the largest single-day jumps in active cases. The state is also seeing a record number of residents hospitalized with the illness at 52, up six from Tuesday.
Gov. Doug Burgum said at a press conference Wednesday the state is "not heading in the right direction" with active cases, hospitalization and testing positivity rates increasing. He said the rise in active cases is now outpacing the rise in testing capacity, a position that state hasn't found itself in at any point in the pandemic.
The Republican governor pleaded with residents on Wedensday to wear a mask in public places to slow the spread of the virus, but he said he would not issue a statewide mandatory mask order like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Burgum did say it was sensible for businesses to mandate masks in their stores or workplaces.
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The department also announced Wednesday that a Burleigh County man in his 70s and a Cass County woman in her 90s have died from the illness. Like nearly every North Dakotan that has succumbed to the illness, the department reports that they had underlying health conditions.
The department says 96 North Dakotans have died from the illness, including 75 residents of Cass County, which includes Fargo and West Fargo. Sixty-four of the deaths have come in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.
There are still four deaths that remain in a " presumed positive " category, which means a medical professional determined that COVID-19 was a cause of death but the person was not tested for the illness while he or she was alive. If those deaths are counted toward the official death count as they are in several other states like New York, there would 100 victims of the illness who resided in the state.
The record number of cases announced Wednesday is due to a "major batch failure," and some of the positive results should have been announced the day before, Burgum said. Still, the new case count for the past week has been about 100 per day.
Forty-two of the new cases came from Cass County, which has seen infections growing after declining earlier this month. The state's most populous county now has 161 active cases.
Thirty-nine of the new cases came from Burleigh County, which encompasses Bismarck. The county that has experienced a consistent rise in infections over the last month once again has the most active cases in the state with 174. Morton County, which sits just west of Burleigh County and includes Mandan, reported 12 new cases.
Eleven new cases came from Williams County, which encompasses Williston. The county has seen a dramatic increase in cases over the last two weeks after largely avoiding the worst of the pandemic for more than three months. The county now has 88 known active cases.
Stutsman County, which includes Jamestown, reported eight new cases, bringing the active case count to 15.
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Twenty-seven counties reported at least one case Wednesday, including many small, rural counties.
About 3.8% of the 4,259 test results announced Wednesday came back positive, but more than half of the tests were performed on those who had previously been tested for the illness. Johns Hopkins University , which calculates the rate of positives using only those tested for the first time, found that an average of closer to 6% of North Dakotans tested over a weeklong period came back positive. The state does not regularly report a seven-day rolling average for positivity rate, but Burgum committed Wednesday to reporting a 14-day rolling average rate on the state's website.
Department spokeswoman Nicole Peske told Forum News Service the agency does not have "a simple way at all" to provide the exact daily positivity rate for those being tested for the first time, even though Burgum said at a press conference earlier this month that the state keeps track of the metric.
Burgum said he did not think the state was artificially lowering the positivity rate by including test results from residents being retested and that including re-tests was a necessary piece of information for policy-making.
The governor said the state has the capacity to perform at least 5,000 tests per day, and he has urged residents to seek testing whether they have symptoms or not. The state has put on free mass testing events in the state's biggest metro areas for more than a month, and officials plan to ramp up testing as students head back to schools and colleges.
A total of 5,367 North Dakota residents have tested positive, but 4,407 have recovered.
The state has announced the results of 270,943 tests, but many residents have been tested more than once.
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