ST. LOUIS — In its Saturday report, the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force reported more encouraging statistics.
Task force hospitals reported 27 COVID-19 related new hospital admissions on Saturday. That is up from 24 on Friday. However, the 7-day moving average of hospital admissions has decreased from 26 on Friday to 25 Saturday.
The 7-day moving average of overall COVID-19 hospitalizations also remained on the decline. It decreased from 505 on Friday, to 493 on Saturday. Actual inpatient hospitalizations decreased from 464 on Friday to 456 on Saturday.
The number of patients in task force hospitals in the ICU rose slightly from Friday to Saturday, from 120 to 122.
The number of patients on ventilators in task force hospitals decreased from 88 on Friday to 84 on Saturday.
Across the task force hospitals, 37 COVID-19 patients were discharged on Friday. There have now been a total of 1,864 COVID-19 patients discharged from task force hospitals.
To watch Task Force Incident Commander Dr. Alex Garza's entire press conference from Friday, you can click here.
Garza said the region has "continued to show nice progress" with rolling averages showing steady decline since late April.
Hospitalizations are now at the lowest they've been since the task force began tracking the data.
Garza presented updated graphs, showing how actual COVID-19 cases lined up with projected models.
“The numbers are tracking very well with our best guess numbers," Garza said. “It's really nice that it’s following that number”
Garza and the task force wanted to make it abundantly clear, though, that it is not the time to relax.
“My biggest concern is that people will equate the lifting of shelter-in-place with the virus being gone," Garza said.
“We know it (the number of infected patients in the area) won’t reach zero at least until we get a vaccine," he said.
Even as places begin to reopen, Garza implored people to continue with best practices to help stop the spread of the virus such as wearing a mask, washing your hands, staying 6 feet apart, staying at home if you can, cleaning surfaces and not gathering in groups of more than 10 people.
“Everyone in the community needs to be practicing these things to help keep the transmission rate low," Garza said.