Another Yellowstone County resident has died due to COVID-19, with Big Horn County reporting four deaths in 24 hours.
The Crow Indian Reservation has extended its stay-at-home order and received over $25 million in allocated CARES Act funding in response to the novel coronavirus.
That includes a woman in her 80s in Toole County died; and a 65-year-old man with underlying health conditions died in Cascade County.
Montana Gov. Steve Bullock said Friday that he would need to see two weeks of sustained reductions in daily COVID-19 case growth, as well as sufficient hospital capacity and testing abilities, before beginning a phased-in rollback of the state's stay-at-home order.
Toole County on Thursday afternoon reported another death from COVID-19, that county's fourth and the state's eighth.
In a reply to a letter Republican legislative leaders sent him earlier in the week, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock on Thursday rebutted critiques of his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Republican leadership of the Montana Legislature on Tuesday said in a letter to Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock they want him to lift the statewide stay-at-home order in counties with no or few COVID-19 cases as a way of restarting the state's economy.
Gallatin County offered a mix of optimism and caution Friday, saying that 106 of the county's 134 confirmed cases of the virus have recovered, but that local hospitals are preparing for a possible surge of a hundred patients later this month.
The day after state medical director Greg Holzman told reporters on a press call that there were no known cases of COVID-19 on Montana's seven tribal reservations, the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux tribes said in a Facebook post their reservation in northeastern Montana has two cases.
The extension also applies to orders such as a post-travel quarantine for most people and pauses on evictions.
Wyoming has no plans for a stay-at-home order to contain the coronavirus but any order for the entire state would contain no exemptions, Gov. Mark Gordon said Monday.
The Crow Indian Reservation and the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation have both issued stay-at-home orders in an effort to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.
