Three deaths, but only 10 new cases, reported

Wise County reported 10 new COVID-19 cases between last Thursday and yesterday, according to the Virginia Department of Health.

As of Monday, the county had reported a total of 10,217 cases since spring 2020, compared to 10,207 cases four days earlier.

There were 305 county residents hospitalized with COVID as of Friday.
The county’s total number of deaths associated with COVID-19 increased by three, from 190 to 193.

The health department’s cumulative positive case count for Norton remained at 1,302.

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 1,185,187 Thursday to 1,188,013 yesterday, an increase of 2,826. The number of cases deemed “probable” rose from 473,381 Thursday to 473,471 yesterday, an increase of 90.

The number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths in Virginia increased by 67 to 16,219.

The number of probable COVID-19 deaths increased by 23 to 3,301.

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.