Cascade County added 142 new cases over the last week and the case rate has increased a bit.

The new case rate is 24.9 per 100,000, according to the Jan. 5 update from the Cascade County City-County Health Department, up from 13.3 per 100,000 last week.

Bowen Trystianson, the interim health officer, said that the county is seeing another rise in cases, which was to be expected after the holidays and with the omicron variant.

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Trystianson said during the Jan. 5 city-county health board meeting that in discussion with community partners, they aren’t seeing significant increases in hospitalizations but they are seeing more utilization of the hospitals and healthcare facilities with general respiratory cases.

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He said that as of Jan. 6, the county had six confirmed cases of the omicron variant and still some delta cases.

The positivity rate this week is 6.1 percent, up from 5.1 percent last week.

Cascade County COVID numbers remain low another week

He told the health board that someone in the county has tested positive for COVID and the flu, which is unfortunate because “we don’t like to see diseases play well together.”

According to CCHD, the county is seeing about 50-50 omicron and delta cases that have been sent to the state lab for genetic sequencing in December and January.

Another 11 breakthrough cases were added to the total this week, but those tests were conducted prior to December, according to CCHD.

COVID numbers continue decline in Cascade County

A breakthrough case is one when a person tests positive for COVID after being fully vaccinated. A person is considered fully vaccinated with a complete series of the vaccine, which is two shots for Pfizer and Moderna and one for Johnson and Johnson.

As of Jan. 3,there were 88,044 total doses of the vaccine administered in the county and 36,772, or 48 percent of the eligible population, have been fully vaccinated, according to the state dashboard.

COVID numbers remain low in Cascade County this week

Among those aged 5-11, there were 10 percent of people with at least one dose of the vaccine, as of Dec. 31, according to the state report.

In Cascade County, 54 percent of the eligible population has at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the state.

As of Jan. 3, there were 12 people hospitalized with COVID at Benefis Health System, four of whom were vaccinated. Three were in the ICU, two of whom were vaccinated. One unvaccinated COVID patient was on a ventilator, according to Benefis. There were 150 non-COVID patients hospitalized, according to the weekly state report.

There were four COVID and 10 non-COVID patients at the Great Falls Clinic, as of Jan. 3, according to the state report.