CentraCare Warns COVID Hospitalizations, Cases Rising

(KNSI) – CentraCare Health is warning Central Minnesotans about a recent rise in COVID-19 cases.

St. Cloud based CentraCare says they’ve gone from a handful of patients needing hospitalization to 35 in the last couple of weeks. Many of those patients are seriously sick.

CentraCare Incident Commander Doctor George Morris

“I know we all wanted COVID to go away, we wanted to be able to open back up again, and we do hope and see the improvements from the vaccine. The reality is we are not done with this yet. We need to be very careful, we need to encourage everybody to do the social distancing, masking, and remember that testing is still very important.”

He says testing is easy and helps identify cases early to help limit the spread of the virus.

“I know that this is hard. We’re looking forward to getting COVID in our rearview mirror. But now is not the time to lose our focus. We really still need to push the vaccinations. get vaccinated when it’s your turn when you’re in the group so we can really help put COVID behind us.”

Minnesota exceeded more than 2,000 daily cases of the coronavirus on Thursday for the first time in months as cases in recent weeks continue to trend upward.

Minnesota has reported around 521,000 cases and nearly 6,900 deaths since the start of the pandemic.

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