NORTH DAKOTA — The United States had a daily COVID-19 case record breaker for daily positive cases on June 24th, just over 38,000. States like Texas, Florida and California are some of the hot spots. But in North Dakota, we only had 42 cases reported on the 24th, less than the daily record of 95 cases from May 20th.
Florida broke its daily record June 24, with about 5,500 cases, more than North Dakota's grand total of 3,393.
Fargo Cass Public Health director Desi Fleming brought up other possibilities as to why other states are seeing sharp increases.
"Things are re-opening in different areas," Fleming said. "Some places I think felt they might have re-opened too soon. I think people are letting their guard down a little bit with the prevention measures and the social distancing."
North Dakota is not seeing a major increase, even with multiple days of mass testing events. Fleming wasn't surprised by the low amount of positive cases uncovered by Fargodome tests.
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"I didn't expect to see really high positive numbers come out of that because you're not really targeting a specific group," she said. "But I think overall, our numbers have seemed to kind of level off a bit. Our hospitalizations have seemed pretty stagnant."
To keep this from going up, Fleming said the community needs to keep socially distancing, wear masks in public places, and wash hands diligently. Anyone who feels symptoms should call their health care provider.
Fleming credits targeted testing done by the Red River Valley COVID-19 Task Force with keeping a spike from happening in Cass County.
"I think it's been a really good strategy for Cass County," Fleming said. "I think it's helped us identify a lot of positive cases that we probably would not have had we not done the targeted testing."
The Fargodome is continuing its mass testing event on Friday, June 16 from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Testing temporarily stopped at the Fargodome on Thursday afternoon after the state reached its maximum testing capacity. Gov. Doug Burgum has previously stated test processing capacity in the state is 5,000.
