Daily South Carolina COVID-19 cases down, remain above 2,000

South Carolina’s daily COVID-19 case count dropped for the third day in a row on Sunday after hitting a summer peak of 3,511 on Thursday, according to data released Tuesday by the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.

There were 1,954 new confirmed cases and 250 probable cases. Eleven new confirmed deaths from COVID also were reported.

The highly contagious delta variant is likely responsible for the majority of COVID-19 cases in South Carolina, according to state health officials. The exact number of delta cases is unknown because only a fraction of confirmed cases undergo genome sequencing, the process used to determine the variant.

Out of 16,717 COVID tests conducted, 15.5% came back positive, up more than 3 percentage points from Saturday. This percentage indicates a very high risk of transmission, according to CDC indicators. Percent positive refers to the number of positive COVID-19 tests in relation to all COVID-19 tests conducted.

There have been more than 527,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases in South Carolina since the start of the pandemic and more than 645,000 cases in all. DHEC provides updated COVID-19 data Monday through Friday at 1 p.m.

This story was originally published August 10, 2021 at 1:42 PM.