Clinton County’s COVID-19 case numbers dipped below the 40 mark once again for the second time in the past month, giving hopes that the limited number of vaccinations already administered, along with precautions by the public and perhaps at least limited herd immunity is trending toward the reduced transmission rate.

Clinton County’s case numbers dropped to 36 total active cases by Tuesday morning, according to the latest Public Information Brief issued by the Lake Cumberland District Health Department.

That number of 36 current cases nearly mirrors the other most frequent low number of cases when Clinton County’s case number dipped to 35 active cases just two weeks ago.

During the past week, Clinton County’s number of released, or no longer contagious cases, outnumbered it’s number of new cases that had been added to the local roll by six cases, 42 new to 48 released.

Although the current case count is a positive sign in Clinton County’s battle against COVID-19 cases, there was still more sad news coming our of the LCDHD report in that there was one new death reported with Monday’s briefing.

According to that report, the most recent death of a Clinton County citizen was that of a 65 year-old who had been hospitalized as a result of COVID-19.

To date, Clinton Count has lost 27 residents to the COVID-19 disease since the pandemic first hit Kentucky nearly a year ago in March, 2020.

The most recent report from LCDHD also noted that as of Tuesday morning, Clinton County had no COVID-19 patients who were hospitalized currently as a result of the disease.

Additional developments that came with the most recent LCDHD Public Information Brief was that Clinton County remained in the highest level of case transmission rates, the “red” or critical spread rate per 100,000 population.

Among the 10 LCDHD counties, Clinton County was the third highest red level county, with a rate of 58.72 infection transmissions among a population figure base of 100,000.

That rate, however, is still lower than it was a week ago when Clinton County’s transmission rate in that category was 69.9.

Clinton County has remained in the critical spread rate, or “red” level for 130 consecutive days as of Monday of this week.

Another positive piece of news coming out of the recent briefings, is that for the first time in several weeks, one of the 10 LCDHD counties, neighboring Cumberland County, had moved out of the red zone.

Cumberland County’s transmission rate fell below the 25 baseline rate at 19.44 per 100,000, moving that county into the middle category of transmission rate of Accelerated Spread, a level of between 10 and 25.

The other nine counties, and the respective seven day average incident rate per 100,000 population were: Russell (80.5), McCreary (77.93), Taylor (60.43), Pulaski (39.79), Wayne (37.94), Green (36.56), Adair (31.25), and Casey (30.94).

Total number of cases among the LCDHD counties in addition to Clinton County’s current 36 positive cases, the current case numbers and the number of hospitalized patients listed in parenthesis are: Adair 35 (2), Casey 21 (1), Cumberland 10 (2), Green 28 (3), McCreary 80 (10), Pulaski 162 (21), Russell 121 (4), Taylor 82 (6), Wayne 56 (6).

Since the pandemic began, there have been a total of 1,366 separate cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Clinton County, meaning that based on a population of 10,218, some 13 percent of the total population here has tested positive for the disease.

Across the 10 county district, there have been 19, 582 confirmed cases.