After a big dip at the start of the week, the number of new COVID-19 cases on a daily basis is rising again in Polk County and today’s figures broke a milestone. The local total of positives is now surpassed 1,000 people who have been found with the virus according to figures released by the Georgia Department of Public Health this afternoon.

Polk County’s case total went up by another 27 positives from the Wednesday afternoon report to today, bringing the overall total since tracking began to 1,018 cases of COVID-19. Today’s report included two new hospital patients that are being treated and reported being from Polk County. That brought the total up to 47.

Wednesday’s death reported earlier today remained the latest, and that figure stood at 12 as of this afternoon.

Though figures for the specific number of tests aren’t posted by the Georgia Department of Public Health on a county-by-county basis, they have begun adding the percentage of people who have tested positive overall, and the percentage of those who have tested positive in the past two weeks.

Overall, the figure with 1,018 positives is at 14.8%, and the number of positives of those tested in the past two weeks sits at 15.6%. Doing some back of the napkin math with the help of Google, that should be somewhere around 6,878 tests administered since late February, give or take.

That isn’t the total number of people who have been tested only because people have potentially been tested multiple times, and therefore that would count as a single test. Therefore, you can only immediately factor the number of cases of COVID-19 that have been reported so far to get a percentage of the overall local population that have tested positive for the virus, which is around 2%.

The county’s 27 new positives for the virus was just a small fraction of the 2,812 new cases added to the state tally for the Thursday report. That brought the total to 246,741 since tracking began in February, with 22,880 people who have been treated in the hospital over the past months.

State figures of new hospital patients increased by 216 on the day. Sadly, another 61 Georgians died from the virus in the past 24 hours.

That brought the total to 4,904 people who have perished due to COVID-19. Statewide, the number of tests stood past 2.3 million administered so far since February.

That’s around a 10.7% positive rate thus far.

Nationally, COVID-19 continues to take a toll. 46,500 new positives were added to the overall tally of 5,506,929 that were confirmed as of August 19 in the CDC’s daily update. They reported that another 1,404 people perished due to the virus, bringing the overall total since tracking began to 172,416 Americans who have died due to the virus.