On March 6, the Indiana State Health Department confirmed the first case of coronavirus. Since then the number of confirmed cases is growing by the hundreds daily as more tests have become available.

There are 676 confirmed cases in Marion County. On Sunday, Dr. Jerome Adams, U.S. surgeon general, included Indianapolis as one of the “emerging hotspots” for the virus.

Adams made the reference in a tweet on Sunday comparing Indianapolis to some cities with more than 1,000 cases each: New Orleans (1,350), Chicago (2,026), Detroit (1,542), Los Angeles (1,818), and Miami (1,192). All of those cities have seen a rapid jump in positive cases.

“Those of us who have been kind of in the thick of this for the last three weeks doesn’t come as a big surprise,” said Dr. Christopher Doehring, vice president of medical affairs at Franciscan Health Network. He continued, “That statement by the surgeon general is just confirmation of what we have already known and been dealing with.”

Doehring says we have still got a way to go in fighting the pandemic.

“We are still probably a couple weeks away from starting to see the peak here. What those models don’t factor in is how effective some of the social distancing and the ‘stay at home’ type orders will have,” said Doehring.

Doehring says the current models project the pandemic to span over a 12-week period, with the peak hitting at weeks 5-7. In central Indiana, we are currently entering week 4.

“We have taken the appropriate steps over the last two weeks but the virus, by the time we started doing some of those things, the virus was already pretty widespread,” said Doehring.