COVID stats looking better

All local COVID-19 statistics continue to improve but one — hospitalization rates.

Wise County reported only six new cases between last Thursday and yesterday, according to the Virginia Department of Health.

As of Monday, the county had reported a total of 10,238 cases since spring 2020, compared to 10,232 cases four days earlier.
There were 308 county residents hospitalized with COVID as of Friday.
The county’s total number of deaths associated with COVID-19 remained at 194.

The health department’s cumulative positive case count for Norton was revised down by one, from 1,303 to 1,302. The reason was not immediately clear.

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 1,190,889 Thursday to 1,193,549 yesterday, an increase of 2,660.
However, the number of cases deemed “probable” showed a decrease once again, from 473,191 Thursday to 472,873 Monday. The reason was not immediately clear.
The number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths in Virginia increased by 38 to 16,339. The number of probable COVID-19 deaths increased by seven to 3,292.

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.