Montgomery County dropped back into the orange zone for COVID-19 spread, allowing restrictions on social gatherings to ease as health officials still warn Hoosiers not to let down their guard in the pandemic.
The orange status, the second-highest level on the state’s COVID-19 map, means that indoor and outdoor social gatherings except religious services are limited to 50 people under Gov. Eric Holcomb’s executive order.
A county has to show lower metric scores for two consecutive weeks before moving down to a lower advisory level.
The county has recorded 323 new cases per 100,000 people in the past week, according to the Indiana State Department of Health. The seven-day all-test positivity rate was 8.89%.
The state’s map showed 78 counties in the orange advisory level, up from 58 last week. Seven Indiana counties remain in the red advisory level.
“As I’ve cautioned before, these changes do not mean we’re out of the woods,” state health commissioner Dr. Kris Box said Wednesday during a weekly media briefing, pointing to limited vaccine supplies and concerns about new strains of the virus.
Indiana health officials are allowing schools across the state to relax their quarantine rules for students with coronavirus exposure even as they offer no timeline for when teachers could become eligible for COVID-19 vaccination shots.
The new school recommendations call for no quarantines if students and teachers exposed to infection at school were at least 3 feet apart and wearing masks at all times. Schools may shorten current 14-day quarantines to seven days if the person exposed has a negative nasal swab test at least five days after exposure.
Box said the new recommendations are in line with current federal guidelines.
The old guidelines still apply during lunch, athletic events or band and choir functions and in classrooms where students are allowed to remove their masks.
The state also announced it is shipping rapid COVID-19 tests and more than 1 million KN95 masks to schools. Additional masks and hand sanitizer are also being sent to critical infrastructure personnel such as transportation and food workers.
State officials opened up vaccine shot eligibility this week for all those ages 65 and older in addition to health care workers. Box said since older people are most at risk of severe COVID-19 illnesses and deaths, they will remain the priority for shots while vaccine doses are in limited supply.
The state health commissioner also announced Wednesday that the pandemic has been even deadlier than thought with an audit of death reports finding about 1,500 more coronavirus-related fatalities than previously recorded. That will increase Indiana’s COVID-19 death toll by 15% to almost 11,600 since March.
In Montgomery County, more than 3,600 cases and 58 deaths have been reported since the pandemic began, according to state figures.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
