There were 43,019 reported cases of COVID-19 in the United States today, but none of them came from Yellowstone National Park, as NPS officials reported that all pending Yellowstone COVID-19 testing came back negative.
Yesterday we reported that the latest round of testing among Yellowstone National Park employees and concessionaire workers came back with no positives among the 346 tests administered in the past three weeks. The news: Of the 1,499 total tests conducted to date, 1,378 returned negative results, with 121 test results still pending.
Those pending results are now in, and the news is uniformly good: no positives among the pending. So for those keeping score at home, there have been 1,499 tests administered since early June (including 467 tests in the past three weeks), and all have come back negative.
In a previous round of testing, two Yellowstone concessionaire employees did test positive, but subsequently tested negative. Since then no positive tests have been recorded.
In addition, no visitors have tested positive in the last four weeks in any of Yellowstone’s medical clinics.
The lack of positive tests at a time when Yellowstone visitation is now higher than a year ago, despite the COVID-19 pandemic and the total collapse of international tourism, says a lot about how Yellowstone officials prepared for a safe reopening.
Photo of the North Entrance on June 26 by Jacob W. Frank, courtesy National Park Service.
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