Four deaths, 41 new cases reported

Wise County reported 36 new COVID-19 cases between last Friday and yesterday, according to the Virginia Department of Health.

As of Thursday, the county had reported a total of 10,207 cases since spring 2020, compared to 10,171 cases six days earlier.
There were 304 county residents hospitalized with COVID as of Friday.
The county’s total number of deaths associated with COVID-19 increased by four, from 186 to 190.

The health department’s cumulative positive case count for Norton increased by five, from 1,297 last Friday to 1,302 yesterday.
There were 40 city residents hospitalized with COVID as of yesterday.
The number of total deaths in the city remained at 22.

In Virginia, the highly contagious omicron variant continues to spread, but the rate of new cases is slowing down.

Statewide, the total number of confirmed cases since the pandemic began rose from 1,179,738 last Friday to 1,185,187 yesterday, an increase of 5,449.
However, the number of cases deemed “probable” was reduced, from 473,474 last Friday to 473,381 yesterday. The reason was not immediately clear

The number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths in Virginia increased by 200 to 16,152. The number of probable COVID-19 deaths increased by 18 to 3,278.

REPORTING CHANGE

The health department announced March 10 that it had made several changes to its COVID-19 reporting dashboards.

“The changes are intended to streamline the information that is most helpful in tracking COVID-19 and its impacts on Virginia at this point in the pandemic,” according to the department.

Acting state health Commissioner Dr. Colin M. Greene said, “With COVID-19 cases continuing to decline, and many communities relaxing restrictions, we are consolidating and focusing on the metrics that matter the most in this new phase of the pandemic.”

Among the notable changes was elimination of a dashboard that provided easily accessible COVID numbers specific to each county and city. Now, the dataset including that information is available on the Virginia Open Data Portal and will be updated Monday through Friday.