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Except for a slight increase in ventilator use, Luzerne County showed improvement in its weekly coronavirus monitoring benchmarks, according to a state health update released Friday.
				Of those hospitalized, an average daily 10.6 county residents were on ventilators, an increase of 0.6 from the previous week&rsquo;s 10, said the report posted at <a href="https://www.health.pa.gov/topics/disease/coronavirus/Pages/Monitoring-Dashboard.aspx" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">www.health.pa.gov</a>, which compares data from the weeks ending Thursday and Jan. 28.
				Fewer county residents were hospitalized for COVID-19 this week &mdash; an average daily 104.4, or 15.2 less than two weeks ago.
				The county had 669 new confirmed coronavirus cases reported this week, or 371 less than the 1,040 cases tracked two weeks ago.
				As a result, the number of cases per 100,000 residents, or county incidence rate, decreased from 327.6 to 210.8 over the two-week period.
				In other early warning updates released Friday, the county&rsquo;s positivity rate, or the percentage of diagnostic tests yielding positive results, fell from 11.2% to a new 10.5%. The county&rsquo;s rate was 1.5% when the state launched the dashboard at the end of June.
				Also, the county&rsquo;s percentage of hospital visits tied to coronavirus-like illnesses was lowered from 1.1% to 0.8% over the two weeks. 
				Statewide numbers
				The state improved in all five benchmark categories.
				There were 20,204 additional confirmed cases this week, or 6,178 less than the 26,382 reported two weeks ago.
				This lowered the state&rsquo;s incidence rate from 206.1 to 157.8.
				The statewide positivity rate dropped from 9.3% to 8.6%.
				An average daily 3,269.6 coronavirus hospitalizations were reported statewide this week &mdash; a decrease of 534.5, the report said.
				On average, there were 400.3 hospitalized residents on ventilators each day this week, a reduction of 53.3.
				The percentage of hospital visits due to coronavirus-like illnesses also declined from 0.7% to 0.6% during the two-week period.

Luzerne County and Pennsylvania show progress in latest weekly coronavirus statistics