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After a high number of coronavirus positives on Friday, the number of confirmed cases have declined again over the last few days, according to Judge-Executive Dan Mosley.

With three cases reported on Saturday and none on Sunday, last week concluded with 41 new cases.

On Monday, Mosley said the county recorded an additional four cases, bringing the overall total to 570. Two of the four, he said, are connected to other previous cases.

There are currently 37 active cases in Harlan County, with one case hospitalized. A total of 13 deaths have also been reported in association with the virus.

“If you were a close contact of any of the positive cases, the Health Department has reached out to you as part of their contact tracing process, or will reach out to you in the very near future,” Mosley said.

He explained the state’s metric for determining a county’s incidence rate has changed a lot for locals over the last couple of weeks because it measures average cases over the last seven days. There are currently 44 counties out of 120 total counties in Kentucky that are in the red category.

As of Monday, Harlan County was in the orange category at 20.3.

“It’s important that our case incidence rate stays in the orange category, or even improve to the yellow or green category so that our kids can continue to receive in-person instruction and enjoy other opportunities they love,” he said.

As of noon on Oct. 19:

— 8,221 tests have been conducted

— 7,651 tests have been negative

“Our positivity rate in Harlan County has remained steady at where we’ve been over the last month at 6.9 percent overall,” Mosley said. “Since last Monday, we saw a slight uptick with 8.0 percent of the tests that have been done in Harlan County over the last week being positive, which is up from 6.8 percent last week, but down from 10.7 percent week before last and 15 percent three weeks ago. This increase from last week is solely due to the high case count on Friday.”

Because of the decline in cases, Mosley said he will continue to provide a weekly update between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Mondays concerning COVID-19 moving forward. Should there be any additional spike in cases or other relevant information regarding the incidence rate or community spread, Mosley said he will share that information as soon as possible.

Refer to the Harlan County Health Department website for the daily case numbers.