Northern Michigan health officials had some guardedly good news on COVID Tuesday at a press conference hosted by Munson Healthcare. They said the region’s positivity rate is still high at 25.5 percent, but it’s dropping.
More good news, they said, is a new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing face masks help protect the person who wears them. Wendy Hirschenberger, Health Officer at the Grand Traverse county health department, said cloth masks lower your risk of testing positive by more than 50 percent, and respirators, the N-95 and KN-95 masks, reduce your risk by 83 percent.
"This is an important study that came out because the previous ones most of us have seen were really focused on using masks for source control, so protecting others when you wore that mask, and so this is something a lot of people have been wondering about for quite a long time and we get questions about that, so if I wear a mask is it protecting me? Yes it clearly is."
Health officials said they want to wait another week or two to scale back mandates and other precautions.
Christine Nefcy, chief medical officer at Munson Healthcare, said even with more people taking home tests, it’s still possible to track COVID infections.
"We don't look at just one thing or one number. We look not only at the percent positivity, and the new cases, how many people are being tested, how many people are hospitalized, what our death rate is, what our employee infection rate is, and absenteeism. It's a broad picture and I think it still gives us a reflection of what's going on in our community."
Nefcy said right now, Michigan’s COVID positivity rate is high, at 22.9percent, but dropping.
Northern Michigan, she said, has a positivity rate of 25.5 percent.