State hits new daily COVID-19 record; Area counties remain low

Indiana has a new single-day reporting record for coronavirus cases.

The Indiana State Department of Health announced 1,962 new cases of COVID-19 Thursday. That brings the state’s total to 141,212 since the pandemic began.

Indiana State Department of Health chief medical officer Lindsay Weaver says the department will consider imposing its own restrictions in counties categorized as “high risk” due to a combination of high numbers of cases and high positivity rates, according to our news-gathering partners at Network Indiana.

Currently, only Fountain County is in that red “high risk” category, but 21 other counties in the state are classified as nearing high risk.

The only area county in the orange or near-high risk category is Jackson County. Brown and Johnson Counties are in the yellow moderate category and Bartholomew, Shelby, Decatur and Jennings Counties are all shown in the state’s blue, or low spread category. As of Wednesday, there were 7 people hospitalized with COVID-19 in Bartholomew County and had been 57 deaths in the county since the pandemic began, the most recent on September 12th.