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MOUNDSVILLE -- Marshall County has seen nearly 40 new positive cases of COVID-19 in the last week, and health officials say contact tracing has become more complicated in recent weeks as people can't -- or won't -- divulge where they've been.
Five new cases of COVID-19 were announced last Wednesday, which brought the total to 184 positive cases since the pandemic started in Marshall County. Subsequent days saw more cases, many of which were asymptomatic.
Thirteen new cases came Thursday, followed by several over the weekend. Monday saw 16 additional cases announced for a total of 222 countywide by Tuesday.
Of the county's total, 36 patients remain quarantined, five are hospitalized, and one death has been reported. Seven additional people have been deemed probable of having the disease and 187 have been released from quarantine.
Marshall County Health Department Threat Preparedness Director Mark Ackermann said the new cases have all originated from community spread, with no large-scale incidents to blame for the outbreak in particular. He said some affected people had apparently contracted it through the same events, but there was not a commonality between the majority of them.
More troubling, Ackermann said, is the increasing difficulty the Marshall County Health Department has experienced in establishing contact tracing. He said people have recently claimed to forget where they have been during times they may have been exposed to COVID, which makes it more difficult to establish a link between infected individuals.
"One thing we're seeing right now is that we think we're having difficulty in getting accurate information on contact tracing," Ackermann said. "We can only contact trace if the contacts are given to us properly. We think, some of the time, people forget or just aren't willing to provide 100 percent of the contacts they've been in contact with, and without that information, it doesn't work correctly."
Ackermann said the reason more people were unwilling or unable to divulge where they have been was unclear, but he said it was possible that, as the weeks and months of the pandemic wear on, people become overall less mindful of where they go as they return to running errands.
"We're seeing an occasional case now where someone wasn't on the contact list, and a few days later they test positive. ... There's a lot of connection here we're not seeing. ... It may be that people are trying to get back to their daily lives and may not really be thinking that way when they're out and about."
Ackermann urged people to continue social distancing, wearing masks, and to be mindful about where they go and who they may have been with.
Additionally, he warned that asymptomatic people are perhaps the greater risk for spreading the disease, as without the signs of being sick, they may take fewer precautions and inadvertently spread COVID more easily.
"So much more of the asymptomatic individuals are spreading, we're seeing more and more asymptomatics," Ackermann said. "… Asymptomatics are really a huge issue right now. They don't have symptoms, they don't think they're sick, and just don't know."
Ackermann added that many healthcare providers, such as MedExpress and Wheeling Health Right, offer rapid testing, which can provide results within 15 minutes. He said the results provided through such tests are about 90 percent accurate, according to the federal government.
"There's always room for confirmation testing, but there's the fact that if the test comes back positive, we have to act on that. Better to be safe than sorry," he said.