Stevens' typology of variable types isn't written in stone and it has some problems. See my blog post: Nominal, ordinal, interval, ratio: Stevens' typology and some problems with it.
However, this is usually not relevant when the variable is a control variable; you can simply add it to the model. If the count took only a very few levels (e.g. it was always either 5, 6, or 10) then you might consider adding it as a categorical variable. That seems unlikely here. If you are concerned about nonlinear effects, you could try a spline of the count, or some form of optimal scoring (in SAS this is available in PROC TRANSREG) but that may not be necessary.