Few cases; many hospitalized

Now, the numbers are going backward.

The latest count of total COVID-19 cases reported in Wise County actually shrank by one.

As of Thursday, the county had reported a total of 10,237 cases since spring 2020, compared to 10,238 reported Monday. The reason for the decrease was not immediately clear.

There were 308 county residents hospitalized with COVID as of Thursday.
The county’s total number of deaths associated with COVID-19 remained at 194.

The health department’s cumulative positive case count for Norton increased by two, from 1,302 to 1,304.

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 1,193,549 Monday to 1,196,249 yesterday, an increase of 2,700.

However, the number of cases deemed “probable” showed a decrease once again, from 472,873 Monday to 472,642 yesterday. The reason was not immediately clear.
The number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths in Virginia increased by 61 to 16,400.

The number of probable COVID-19 deaths remained at 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.