After steadily climbing to new heights last week, the number of active cases of COVID-19 in Park County sank on Monday, as more than a dozen people were documented as having recovered from the disease.

State data showed that the county had 36 active cases on Monday — 30 confirmed and six probable cases — of the respiratory disease. Thanks to 15 newly announced recoveries, that was down from a peak of 53 active cases over the weekend.

Still, Park County added four new confirmed cases on Monday as people continue to become infected. In the first few months of the pandemic, when testing was severely limited, only two local cases were confirmed.

“The only thing reassuring about these trends is that we haven’t had anyone lately that is sick enough to be in the hospital,” Park County Health Officer Dr. Aaron Billin wrote in a Friday Facebook post, before the additional recoveries were announced.

He added that, “It takes a couple of weeks for the young and [healthy] who were out without masks or social distancing to pass it on to those at risk and for those at risk to get sick enough to be in the hospital.”

Nearly 80% of the county’s confirmed cases involve people under the age of 50, with the average age at 37, Billin said last week. Half of the roughly 60 infections to date have involved Powell residents, according to figures he posted to Facebook on Monday morning, with a couple dozen in Cody and nine at Pahaska Tepee Resort.

Billin said Friday that active cases were up 167% in Park County in the last week and up 24% in Wyoming, saying that “the cases are coming faster.”

One Facebook commenter wondered if the fact that more people were becoming infected, but not becoming sick enough to be hospitalized, was a sign that the county was moving closer to developing “herd immunity” — where enough people develop immunities to the disease that it becomes unlikely to spread further.

However, Billin noted that medical experts currently do not know if people infected with COVID-19 will remain permanently immune to the disease. Further, “studies show that for COVID-19 at least 60% of the population would need to be immune in order to achieve herd immunity,” Billin said. In Park County, that would mean 17,516 of the county’s 29,194 estimated residents would need to become infected. Assuming what Billin called “the most conservative case fatality rate of 0.23%,” that would result in around 40 deaths.

Herd immunity “isn’t happening anytime soon,” Billin said.

Meanwhile, Powell Valley Healthcare has seen a surge in the number of people seeking to be tested for COVID-19 in recent days.

PVHC officials say their Cepheid rapid-testing machine can complete 96 tests a day, but 226 samples were collected on one day late last month, which led to a 24 to 48 hour delay on results. Due to the limited number of supplies, PVHC has capped the number of tests to 50 per day. Billin said the organization ran out of its daily allotment within 30 minutes last week. Some people have been tested multiple times.

On Monday, county public health officials issued a news release saying that testing at PVHC needs to be prioritized in order to avoid a shortage of supplies.

“We are asking Park County citizens to only be tested if they develop symptoms of Covid-19 or are instructed to by a healthcare professional,” Kelly Croft of Park County Public Health said in the release. She said people are being tested unnecessarily, also noting that a negative test “does not change or reduce the number of days a previously quarantined person is quarantined.”

“Close contacts of a positive case are quarantined for 14 days regardless of a negative test,” Billin said, “because COVID-19 has an incubation period of up to 14 days.”

If you think you’ve been exposed to the coronavirus and are asymptomatic, PVHC officials and Billin are asking people to wait 72 hours before being tested “as it usually takes several days for the test to turn positive.”

“Some employers are requiring a negative test before a person under quarantine or isolation returns to work,” Billin said. “This is not necessary.”

The Wyoming Department of Health considers a person to have recovered from COVID-19 when they no longer have a fever and their respiratory symptoms (like a cough, fever or shortness of breath) have improved for 72 hours — and at least 10 days have passed since the person first started showing symptoms. An asymptomatic person is considered to have recovered if they’re still not showing symptoms 10 or more days after testing positive.