Five deaths, 29 new cases reported

The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Wise County increased by 29 between March 16 and Wednesday.

The Virginia Department of Health reported Wednesday morning that the county’s total confirmed cases in the months since the pandemic began had risen to 10,229 — up from 10,200 one week earlier.
The number of Wise County COVID-19 deaths increased by five, from 189 to 194.

As of yesterday, 306 Wise Countians were hospitalized with COVID.
Locally and across Virginia, the omicron variant continues to spread, but the rate of increase is slowing down.

Statewide, the total number of confirmed cases since the pandemic began rose from 1,183,900 March 16 to 1,190,043 Wednesday, an increase of 6,143.
However, the number of “probable” cases in Virginia was revised down from 473,509 reported March 16 to 473,089 reported yesterday. The reason for the decrease was not immediately clear.

During the same period, the number of confirmed deaths increased by 157 to 16,275. The number of probable COVID-19 deaths increased by 14 to 3,288.

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, by clicking the COVID-19 link, and will be updated Monday through Friday.