Is COVID surge over? After months with high spread Horry County drops to ‘moderate’
After months of a surge of coronavirus infections that rivaled some of the worst points in the pandemic, Horry County has dropped to “moderate” spread in the area, according to new numbers from the state health department.
Horry County has been in a “high” spread category since July, the beginning of a spike in cases driven largely by the highly contagious delta variant. But Thursday’s update from the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) shows Horry in the moderate category, joining its neighbors Dillon and Georgetown counties, among others across the state.
DHEC identifies moderate spread as 51-200 new cases in the last two weeks per 100,000 residents, while a high spread is categorized as more than 200 cases in a two-week period per 100,000 residents. During the late-summer surge, the county consistently reported thousands of new cases every week.
Hospitalizations also skyrocketed, particularly in August. Local health systems buckled under the demand, with one hospital operating at more than 100% capacity and overall hospital capacity in the county pushing past 90% in August. The White House identified Horry County as a “hotspot” in the midst of a nationwide surge spurred by the spread of the delta variant.
Local doctors stressed the most likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 were in a younger, unvaccinated population. Even if patients were vaccinated when they were hospitalized with the virus, doctors said they were likely to take up fewer of the hospital’s resources and generally fare better — rarely ending up on a ventilator or facing death.
“By far and away, vaccinated people are doing much better. By far and away, that is a fact,” Dr. Paul Richardson, chief medical officer at Conway Medical Center, told The Sun News in August. “It looks like I’m not getting anywhere near as sick as I potentially could get if I don’t get the vaccine. So that is holding true, no doubt that is holding true.”
Just over 50% of Horry County’s overall population is fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a number that’s bound to increase now that kids ages 5 and up are cleared by federal agencies to receive the shot as of this week.
The CDC has its own method of categorizing county-level transmission of the virus, and the agency still lists Horry County in high spread, meaning it’s recommended everyone wear masks indoors regardless of vaccination status. The CDC’s definition of a high spread is more than 100 new cases per 100,000 people in the last seven days, versus DHEC’s definition of more than 200 cases per 100,000 people in the last two weeks.
