Mecklenburg County Health officials have just announced that there could already be over 24,000 cases of COVID-19 in our city.
In today’s press release, health officials said that due to a restricted ability to test individuals who display only the worst symptoms (only 19,400 people have been tested over the past month), today’s confirmed case count of 1,231 could represent “as little as 5-10%” of the true number of cases in our county.
“If we’re going to start releasing some of the pressure on some of the restrictions that we’ve seen across the country, we’ve got to have better testing available to us, and better contact tracing. At this time in this county, we do not have that,” said Mecklenburg County Public Health Director Gibby Harris.
An update on Mecklenburg County’s response to COVID-19. https://t.co/xHwkaTQN8W
— Mecklenburg County (@MeckCounty) April 20, 2020
Harris also noted that an infant under 1 year old has tested positive for COVID-19.
The county is urging residents to continue to social distance and created the following graphic to drive home the point:
According to the CDC, patients with confirmed CoVID-19 infection have reportedly had mild to severe respiratory illness with symptoms of:
- fever
- cough
- shortness of breath
CDC believes at this time that symptoms of CoVID-19 may appear in as few as 2 days or as long as 14 after exposure.