Virginia’s increase in COVID-19 cases rose by 3,793 in Saturday’s report from the Virginia Department of Health, which included a notation that some of the cases were a “backlog” that had been reported earlier but the numbers follow a pattern of increases in the Old Dominion and nationwide recently.
The Roanoke Valley (city, county and Salem) reported 171 news cases, while Montgomery County (including Radford) has 58 and Floyd added five more to bring our county’s total to 376.
Nationwide, 14.7 million are infected and 285,668 are dead from the pandemic. Wordwide, the death toll is 1.5 million with 66.4 million infected.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) or the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) is not saying if the increases we are seeing this weekend are related to those who ignored advice last weekend to stay home and not travel to spend Thanksgiving with loved ones but those new infections should be starting to appear.
Many American residents ignored the advice of medical experts and traveled via plane, train, and cars on Thanksgiving leaving medical personnel and medical personnel bracing for even sharper increases in infections, hospitalizations, and deaths.
Increases has been on the rise before the holidays in both urban and rural areas. New York City is hobbled by increases and overflows in already-cramped hospitals. Same for California, where stay-at-home orders are expected in Southern California and the Aan Joaquin Valley, starting at 11:509 pm.
“Today we had 22,000 cases, yesterday we had 18,700,” Dr. Mark Ghaly, the California Health, and Human Services secretary told the Los Angeles Times Friday in an interview. “At these levels … it tells you that the hospitals in just two weeks are going to be much more impacted than they are now.”