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Kent County leads state in new daily COVID-19 cases

Posted at 6:04 PM, May 26, 2020
and last updated 2020-05-26 18:04:30-04

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Since May 20, Kent County has lead the entire state of Michigan in new daily confirmed cases of Covid-19, according to Access Kent's Covid-19 dashboard.

Kent County's confirmed cases were 102 on May 20, and since then have been nearly double the second closest county. While Wayne, Oakland and Macomb Counties still have the highest numbers overall, Kent County ranks fourth in total number of cases, which stood at 3,420 as of Tuesday afternoon.

Fox 17 spoke with Dr. Adam London, the director of the Kent County Health Department who told us Kent County now has more reliable streams of testing supplies, thanks in part to them teaming up with hospitals and private partners to ramp-up testing.

"I think our testing has increased quite a bit here in West Michigan and Kent County, and people should realize at the health department we have created strike teams, which are going out and doing testing of higher risk communities," Dr. London said. "Long term care homes and other congregate group settings, so were taking a little bit different strategy than maybe other counties, where we're going out more aggressively looking for infections."

"Look at the number of deaths relative to number of cases, and what you'll see in Kent County is we're in about a 2% case mortality rate right now, where many large counties across the state are at about 10%," Dr. London said. "That gives you some insight as to how those two relate and the 2% you see here in Kent County is strongly suggestive that we're doing more testing and identifying more cases."

Within the county, the zip code 49507 in Wyoming and parts of Grand Rapids has the highest number of confirmed cases. Dr. London added.

"That tells us an awful lot about community transmission," Dr. London said. "It also says something about what the virus is doing relative to where people work and how they interact in their community. It also tells us where we should be locating neighborhood based testing centers, and we're going to be opening some new testing sites in the next week or two."

That area is just east of US 131, Franklin Street is the northern border, 28th street is the southern border and Fuller and Kalamazoo Avenues are the eastern border.