COVID-19 weekly update

Last week Oklahoma saw a decrease in COVID-19 cases with the seven-day average of new cases ending at 663.14, the lowest since mid-July.

Edmond ranks fourth in total cases among cities in Oklahoma with 1,606. The city also has reported 19 COVID-19 related deaths.

On Aug. 3 the city said it had 691 confirmed cases of COVID-19.

While other cities passed and immediately implemented their mask mandate, Edmond did not.

Edmond voted 3-2 to pass a mask mandate in late July, but fell one vote short of the votes required to make it take immediate effect. Due to this, the mandate will not go into effect until Aug. 26.

While other cities have begun to see their new case totals drop in recent weeks, Edmond has not. Cities such as Oklahoma City, Tulsa and Norman have not seen the severe rise in case totals or hospitalizations they were used to seeing.

In a set of tweets on Aug. 13, OKC Mayor David Holt proclaimed that masking was working. Aug. 13 was the three-week mark since the city implemented a mask mandate.

“As you can see in the charts below, new cases have declined a third from their highs,” Holt said in a tweet. “Hospitalizations had consistently been above 200 for three weeks, but have now dipped as low as 142 this past week.”

Cities such as Tulsa, who implemented a mandate on July 15, saw their county seven-day average of new cases peak at 254 in late July. But on Aug. 13 their seven-day average was 154. 

Norman also passed a mask mandate in early July and has since seen their new case average start to drop.

When the mask mandate was passed on July 7, the three-day average of new cases for the City of Norman was 20.67. On Aug. 14 the average was 14.

Mask mandates are clearly helping in cities where they are being implemented. In Edmond the decision to wait has had an adverse effect on the city as their case totals have more than doubled since Aug. 3.

At the Aug. 3 city council meeting, Edmond City Councilman David Chapman said he worries about the effect students going back to school will have on the rise in cases.

“We’re going to have that dynamic and then we’re going to have 15,000 or so UCO students back on the 20th … it’s just really hard to predict what’s going to happen,” Chapman said. 

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