Officials at Freeman Health System had encouraging news Wednesday about the continuing decline of COVID-19 patients. KRPS’s Fred Fletcher-Fierro has more.

Mirroring national and statewide trends in the number of new COVID-19 cases Freeman President and CEO Paula Baker said Wednesday that the hospital had 12 COVID patients, none of which are on ventilators. To compare, at a press briefing on June 24 of this year, an official with Freeman said they had 40 COVID patients, a 70% decline.

Baker says the hospital is still experiencing a high positivity rate, “So far with all the patients that we have tested we have about a 19% positivity rate, and we have about a 2% mortality rate, which is also fairly typical.” While Freeman is reporting 19 out of every 100 patients testing positive for COVID. According to the Missouri Department of Health website Wednesday, Missouri is averaging a combined 6.25% positive rate between PCR and antigen tests. A difference of 12.75% between the two entities. For 89 9 KRPS, I’m Fred Fletcher-Fierro