The Rock County Public Health Department is starting to see more patients recover from COVID-19.
Last week, the county started reporting the number of positive cases who have recovered, providing more context to the local impact of the disease.
Rock County Epidemiologist Nick Zupan said the state hasn’t provided a clear definition of how to determine whether a person has recovered, so the local health department is working off of a conservative definition to standardize the measurement.
For now, the county won’t count a patient as recovered until at least 30 days after the person first tested positive for COVID-19. After those 30 days, the patient has to go 72 hours without showing systems before they are considered recovered.
Zupan said they’ve seen cases where a patient tests positive, starts to recover and then ends up hospitalized again even four weeks later.
Rock County first reported two recovered cases on April 23. As of Sunday, that number was up to 17 patients recovered and five deaths out of 151 positive cases.
Zupan believes there are likely more patients in the community who have recovered, but the health department wants to use a more conservative definition until it can better test for and track recovery.
