Another 55 people with the new coronavirus in Massachusetts have died and 575 more cases were detected, health officials said Saturday.
The state's death toll has risen to 7,289, while 103,132 people who have been diagnosed with the virus in Massachusetts, according to the Department of Public Health's daily report.
It was released announced hours after Gov. Charlie Baker announced that the Bay State will progress to the first step of Phase 2 of the reopening plan on Monday. Several positive trends seen in the public health department's daily coronavirus report informed Baker's decision to move forward.
Friday's report brought another clearly positive development: the number of coronavirus patients in hospitals was listed as trending positively, a step up from where it had been. It was the first change in any of the six public health indicators the state set up to track its progress since they were launched on May 18.
This week, the coronavirus case total surged past 100,000 and the death toll past 7,000, sped by the department deciding to add in probable cases and probable deaths to the tallies it was keeping.
See Massachusetts' list of COVID-19 hot spots.
The six indicators informing how fast Massachusetts can move through the four phases are: the COVID-19 positive test rate, the number of individuals who died from COVID-19, the number of patients with COVID-19 in hospitals, the health care system's readiness, testing capacity, contact tracing capabilities.
For the first time since the report started listing the indicators, one has changed. In Friday's report, the number of coronavirus patients in hospitals was listed as trending positively, a step up from where it had been.
There are now 1,529 people with COVID-19 in Massachusetts hospitals. That's down from a high of nearly 4,000 during the surge.
For months, Massachusetts has been one of the epicenters of COVID-19 in the U.S. It has the fifth-most cases among all states and, after probable cases were added Monday, the third-most deaths.
Baker and other health officials have said Massachusetts' high tallies may be due to the state testing among the most residents per capita in the country.
