Health and Medicine
Dr. Cynthia Morrow/VDH-VT photo
Northside High School is suspending its football season indefinitely after four players and a coach tested positive for coronavirus. The Roanoke County school’s football Facebook page says none of the team’s 42 players or five coaches are permitted back in school until contract tracing has been completed. Northside was scheduled to play Glenvar this Friday. The school asked all players to stay home today while contact tracing continues. The Vikings won’t be back on the football field until at least March 15. Dr. Cynthia Morrow with the Roanoke City and Alleghany Health Districts:
March has arrived, a month many Virginians are not likely to forget – certainly not March of last year, when COVID-19’s arrival upended life as we knew it. On March 1st, 2020, life was normal in Virginia, but that would soon change in a big way — the first COVID case in the state was identified six days later. It wasn’t long before that number quickly swelled to more than 1,500 by the start of April, 100,000 by August 9th. It’s now around 600,000statewide, but the numbers are now encouraging, and the news now appears to be more hopeful than ominous, but not entirely so. WFIR’s Evan Jones has more:
NEWS RELEASE: The Virginia Department of Health (VDH) announced today that a new single-dose COVID-19 vaccine will begin being offered in Virginia next week following federal approval of a third vaccination that has been proven to prevent serious illness, hospitalization and death from the disease.
On Saturday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an emergency use authorization (EUA) for a new vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson. The EUA allows the vaccine to be distributed in the U.S. for those 18 and older.
Virginia is expected to receive 69,000 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine next week, which will be prioritized for mass vaccination7 clinics across the state. An additional allotment is expected to be sent to pharmacies participating in a federal partnership to help vaccinate priority groups, such as those 65 and older, at no cost.
VDH encourages all providers who schedule vaccine appointments to advise individuals which vaccine they will receive, because the Johnson & Johnson vaccine differs from those available from Pfizer-BioNtech and Moderna in that it requires only one dose, rather than two. All three vaccines have been proven to be effective at preventing COVID-19-related hospitalization and death5
There is a long way to go, but the Virginia Department of Health reports more than 6% of state residents are now fully vaccinated against COVID-19 – and more than 13% have received at least one dose. But as those numbers grow, there are new concerns about COVID variants that are increasingly showing up. WFIR’s Evan Jones takes a closer look into that as he reports in depth:
Photo: CVS Health
More pharmacy chains are joining Virginia’s COVID-19 vaccination program this week — and Virginia health officials want these new providers to link their appointments to the state’s vaccine pre-registrations. Slots for the first pharmacy-administered vaccinations at CVS required a separate signup from health department sites. But with Kroger, Walgreens and Walmart now joining in, the goal is for them to schedule appointments through your state pre-registration. WFIR’s Evan Jones has more:
FROM VDH : (RICHMOND, Va.) – The Virginia Department of Health (VDH) today announced that the first case of the SARS-CoV-2 variant B.1.1.7 has been identified in a sample from an adult resident of Central Virginia who had no history of travel during the exposure period. The B.1.1.7 variant, which first emerged in the United Kingdom in late 2020, is associated with increased person-to-person transmission of COVID-19. A preliminary report from experts in the United Kingdom indicates that this variant causes more severe illness than other variants, but more studies are needed to confirm this finding. To date, the B.1.1.7 variant has been identified in 44 other U.S. states.
The Department of General Services Division of Consolidated Laboratory Services (DCLS) confirmed the case using next-generation sequencing that provides a genetic blueprint of the virus that causes COVID-19. In addition to this case of the B.1.1.7 variant, eleven other cases of the B.1.1.7 variant and three cases of the SARS-CoV-2 B.1.351 variant (first identified in South Africa) have now been identified in Virginia, as of February 24. With the combined state and national surveillance efforts, it is likely that additional cases with SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern will be identified.
Viruses change all the time, and VDH expects to see new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus as disease spreads. As our public health officials closely monitor the emergence of these SARS-CoV-2 variants in our Commonwealth, it is critical that all Virginians comply now with mitigation measures. We are in a race to stop the spread of these new variants. The more people that become infected, the greater that chance the virus will mutate and a variant will arise that could undermine the current vaccination efforts. Public health recommendations for stopping the spread of COVID-19 will work for all COVID-19 variants. This means wearing masks correctly, staying at least six feet from others, avoiding crowds, washing hands often, getting vaccinated for COVID-19 when it is your turn, and staying home if you are infected with COVID-19 or if you have had close contact with someone with COVID-19.
As of February 23, 2021, approximately 1.9 million Virginians have joined the fight against COVID-19 using their mobile devices. This includes 1,008,322 downloads of COVIDWISE – the nation’s first app using the Google/Apple framework and the second most downloaded exposure notifications app in the United States. An estimated 900,975 additional iPhone users have also turned on COVIDWISE Express, which is a secondary exposure notifications option specifically for iPhone users.
DCLS began sequencing positive COVID-19 samples in March 2020, becoming one of the first public health labs in the nation to use this technology to examine the genetic makeup of the virus and track how it is changing and being transmitted in the Commonwealth. DCLS is working with other labs in Virginia to solicit additional positive samples to sequence so public health officials can get a representation of variants circulating throughout Virginia.
For more information about COVID-19 variants, visit the VDH COVID-19 Testing website and the CDC New COVID-19 Variants website. For more information on DCLS and its use of next-generation sequencing, visit dgs.virginia.gov/dcls.
Governor Northam said this morning with the COVID numbers going down some restrictions will be loosened starting on Monday. That means starting March 1 alcohol sales until midnight instead of 10pm, no more midnight to 5-am curfew and outdoor social gathering size limits will rise from 10 to 25. Sports and entertainment venue capacities will go from 250 maximum to 30 percent of capacity – with a 1000 person limit – at least until April, when the hard cap could be removed if the COVID numbers continue trending downward.