INGHAM COUNTY - Last Tuesday, the Ingham County Health Department (ICHD) announced the summary updates for the COVID -19 case counts in Ingham County for February 8 following the last Omicron surge.

As of February 8, 2022, Michigan had reported over 18,000 COVID cases since the start of the year, with 12,947 current active cases and hospitalization cases dropping from 170 to 153 since the last update in Ingham County, 20 of which were reported in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).

Following the Omicron surge that started in late December after the holiday, case counts in Ingham County have declined significantly (and continue to drop) to the baseline number of cases reported just before the Omicron variant.

Health Officer Linda Vail from the Ingham County Health Department said, “ We are coming down in trends right now, which makes it the time to take a look at a mask mandate and starting to make a lot of shifts we are already making; Omicron made it kind of difficult to claim that we are not in an emergency because that was the highest number of cases we have seen in this entire pandemic.”

Considering the current age-standardized rates for COVID-19 cases and deaths by vaccination and vaccination + booster status, vaccinated adults who received their booster shot were 11.7 times less likely to test positive for COVID-19 and almost 60 times less likely to prevent the risk of dying when compared to unvaccinated adults. In contrast, the First dose vaccinated adults were 3.6 times less likely to test positive for COVID-19 and almost 11 times less likely to prevent the risk of dying when compared to unvaccinated adults.

"The Vaccine is not preventing all infections, we had hope that it would prevent all infections, but it looks like COVID is gonna become endemic and we are gonna learn to live with this virus and in the that endemic stage it should be very manageable" Officer Vail stated

Based on the current numbers of declining cases in the Ingham, officer Vail said that mask mandating might be lifted by the end of February as they are currently negotiating certain decisions with the state.

For more information about the updated COVID-19 statistics, visit the Ingham County Health Department website.