The number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Kent County more than doubled in the past week as new data suggests a surge of the coronavirus has arrived in West Michigan after the number of new infections began leveling off in metro Detroit.

Positive cases of COVID-19 in Kent County rose to 1,305 on Tuesday from 626 on April 21, a 109 percent increase and a nearly four-fold increase over the past two weeks. In neighboring rural Ionia County, the number of cases of COVID-19 also has doubled in one week's time, state data shows.

Percentage growth in newly confirmed cases of the deadly coronavirus in West Michigan is far outpacing metro Detroit, a Crain's analysis shows.

Kalamazoo and Ottawa counties each reported 63 percent increases in cases over the past week, while Muskegon County's coronavirus cases have increased by 51 percent in seven days and more than doubled over two weeks. Berrien and Calhoun counties have seen increases of 36 percent and 35 percent, respectively.

By comparison, growth in Detroit and Oakland County — the epicenters of the pandemic in Michigan — has slowed to 11 percent over the past week, followed by a 15 percent increase in total confirmed cases in Washtenaw County, 16 percent in suburban Wayne County and an 18 percent increase in Macomb County.

West Michigan hospital executives said Monday that they were bracing for a pandemic surge to reach their emergency rooms.

"The modeling tends to suggest that we probably are going to see an uptick of cases in a few weeks," said Peter Hahn, M.D., CEO of Metro Health, a 208-bed Grand Rapids hospital that's part of the University of Michigan Health System. "It's just a matter of how big and how wide that wave is."

Hyung Kim, M.D., the president of Mercy Health St. Mary's Hospital in Grand Rapids, said the 303-bed hospital "can handle the surge as it occurs."