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Officials with the hospital system that serves southwest Virginia and northeast Tennessee believe the UK COVID-19 variant is driving a surge of cases there.
Ballad Health and a contractor have been conducting wastewater testing across its service region. Doctor Clay Runnells said preliminary results found a significant amount of COVID-19 in wastewater as well as the B.1.1.7 UK variant.
And we currently feel like that B.1.1.7 is driving the surge we’ve been seeing in the region, Runnells said in a news conference Wednesday.
Credit CDC
Runnells noted all of the current vaccines are effective against the UK variant, though demand for the vaccines has slowed down dramatically. He said getting more people vaccinated would turn the current surge around.
The Virginia Department of Health is continuing efforts to roll out COVID-19 vaccines to people in the 1A group – that’s frontline health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities. But details on the next steps are still being ironed out.
During a media briefing Wednesday, VDH Division of Immunization director Christy Gray said officials expect Virginia to get a weekly allocation of about 100,000 vaccine doses over the next few weeks.
And plans are being finalized for rollout to groups 1B and 1C – essential workers and high-risk adults:
“We have requested back from the Virginia Vaccine Advisory Workgroup and those comments were relayed to the Virginia Disaster Medical Advisory Committee for their review, Gray explained. The committee’s recommendations and the comments will be provided to Virginia Unified Command for final approval this week.”
The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 related complications continues to rise in the western part of the state.
363 people were hospitalized in the health department’s Near Southwest region. That includes hospitals in Roanoke, Lynchburg, Danville, Martinsville and parts of the New River Valley.
A graph of COVID-19 hospitalizations from the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association.
A week ago, that figure was 305. The number of patients in Intensive Care (83) and on ventilators (44) also increased.
Statewide, 2,586 people were hospitalized with confirmed or pending COVID-19 diagnoses Wednesday, according to the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association dashboard. That s the highest number since the pandemic began and about a thousand more than one month ago.