Hi, this is mayor John Hamilton. It's Tuesday, October 27th, and just wanted to share this message with the public updating on COVID and how our community is doing. So thank you again. Monroe County is doing relatively well as we continue to monitor the spread of the virus. We do know our hospitals had a bump up in cases and we've seen some increase locally, but the main message I want to give is we're doing better than the state.
And that's, I believe because we are choosing and putting in place some controls that are tighter than the state, both with mandatory mask coordinates that went in early and also our continued controls over large gatherings, whether it's social gatherings or public gatherings. Those have really helped us keep our numbers down and that's been very important. The state numbers are extremely concerning.
The state has seen a very significant rise just to share a couple of data points for you to be aware of. During August and September, the state average around eight or 900 new cases per day, pretty steady during that two month period. Since October, it has more than doubled. It is now over 2000 cases per day. That's a very dramatic rise in the number of individual cases per day.
Similarly, even the death rate, which was hovering around 10 per day, again in August and September has doubled to about 20 per day. Those are really significant and concerning signals for the statewide numbers and experience of COVID. Locally we have not seen that. In fact, we've continued to see much better results, but we are not an island. We do get affected by what's going on around us, both our healthcare system and each of us as individuals.
So please continue to do the right things by wearing masks, maintaining distance from folks. Do not do social gatherings, particularly when they're not masked and distanced. They are places where we see this spread happening. We appreciate the work of our school corporation, Indiana University, and businesses and enterprises that are working so hard to do this.
We are entering the flu season. So you should all get your flu shots unless your doctor advises against that. That's really important too to help us tamp down the overall spread. So the basic message is we've done pretty well the last couple of months, but the state is not doing well and that can definitely affect us. So we have to keep the regime that we have in place I think for several more weeks.
Keep doing those things that have helped keep us safe and our family members and neighbors safe. That's so important. And thank our healthcare workers. Do get out and vote, get a flu shot, and thanks for taking care of our city and each other as you do. And we'll give you another update soon.
