BLYTHEWOOD/FAIRFIELD COUNTY – On Friday, April 3, Governor Henry McMaster ordered the South Carolina Department of Environmental Control (DHEC) to resume the practice of releasing confirmed COVID-19 case numbers by ZIP code after DHEC had announced earlier last week that it would stop providing the ZIP code information.
The latest DHEC ZIP code update available (released on April 9 at 4:08 p.m.) lists 26 confirmed cases for 29016, 25 of which are in the Blythewood community, and 1 in a small area of Fairfield County that lies in 29016. The total number of confirmed cases in Fairfield County’s ZIP codes is 17.
Looking at the rate of cases per 100K of county populations, Fairfield County ranks 8th highest at 76.07, just behind No.7, Charleston County.
Those numbers, as of Thursday, included four new cases in Blythewood and one case in Fairfield County (29055), but DHEC’s estimated current cases for both Blythewood and Fairfield County are much greater – 160 in Blythewood 29016 and 94 in Fairfield County’s ZIP codes.
Estimated cases are calculated by DHEC based on evidence that for every known case of COVID-19, there could be up to 9 people with the virus who remain unidentified in the community.
“There are many people within our communities who have the virus and have never been tested,” DHEC said. “[Those with] undocumented infections often experience mild, limited or no symptoms, which is why they go unrecognized, and they can expose a far greater portion of the population to the virus.”
The DHEC chart also includes ‘possible’ cases which would bring Blythewood 29016’s total cases to 186 and Fairfield County’s to 111. The number of total possible cases is derived from combining the reported and estimated cases.
While the official number of cases who have tested positive for the coronavirus in South Carolina is 2,792 as of Thursday, health officials said there could be nearly 19,500 cases currently across the state.
As South Carolina moves from containment strategy to a disease mitigation strategy, there’s less focus on the number of individual cases in an area and more focus on limiting overall spread throughout the state, SCDHEC officials stated.