UPDATE: The Baker County Health Department reported three cases on Friday, April 1.

The zeroes continue to accumulate in Baker County’s column for COVID-19 tracking.

The county didn’t report a single case for the final 14 days of March.

That’s the longest such streak since June 2020.

Baker County reported its first COVID-19 case on May 6, 2020. The county didn’t have another until the last week of June 2020.

Case rates have fluctuated since, with significant drops during the winter and spring of 2021 and again in the fall of that year, with major increases due to the delta variant in late summer 2021 and in January 2022 due to the omicron variant.

But since the county hit a record high of 183 cases the week of Jan. 16-22, case totals have plummeted more rapidly than at any other period during the pandemic.

The March total of 14 cases — and only one after March 11 — is the fewest in any month since June 2020, when there were four.

The recent absence of cases does not mean no county residents are being tested for COVID-19, although that number has dropped too.

For the current measuring week, March 27-April 2, the county reported 62 tests — all of them negative — through March 31.

For the previous week there were 131 tests, again, all of them negative.

For the week March 13-19, there were 156 tests, one of those positive.

And for March 6-12, there were 199 tests, seven of which were positive.

The Baker County Health Department announced this week that starting Monday, April 4, it will begin posting case counts on its Facebook page weekly rather than daily.

The Oregon Health Authority will also cease sending a daily media release on April 4, although daily case counts and other statistics will continue to be available on the agency’s website, https://govstatus.egov.com/OR-OHA-COVID-19.