The pandemic continues, and numbers are trending in unfortunate directions. Here’s what we’re seeing:
- The University of Virginia COVID-19 model explorer projects coronavirus cases to tick upward through mid-December in Richmond and across much of the state. They’re projecting just under 15,000 new cases per week by Dec. 13, based on what’s happening now and current trends. That’s about a doubling of what’s being seen now: Today’s count tracked by the Virginia Department of Health shows 1,332 new cases. The seven-day positivity rate is at 5%.
- The city is posting a lower rate of positive tests, at 3.9%, but cases have ticked upward over the past 16 days, according to Dr. Danny Avula, supervisor for the Richmond and Henrico Health Districts, according to a WRIC-TV report on Wednesday.
- Drug overdoses also have ticked upward, as noted in a study from Virginia Commonwealth University researchers in the Journal of the American Medical Association. There was a 123% increase in overdoses not resulting in deaths seen at the VCU Medical Center from March to June, a total of 227, in comparison with 102 over the same period in 2019. Overall emergency room visits were down 29% in March through June 2020 compared with March through June the previous year. The study is attributed to Dr. Taylor Ochalek, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Wright Center.
- Drug overdose deaths, the leading cause of accidental deaths in the commonwealth, are predicted to soar by year’s end, to a record 1,699. There were 1,626 drug fatalities in Virginia in 2019, the most ever.
- An update on another study in JAMA from a VCU researcher, Dr. Steven Woolf, also tracks the pandemic’s impact by some appalling numbers: Deaths in the United States increased by one fifth between March 1 and Aug. 1 this year compared with the same period the previous year, but only 67% of those fatalities are from the coronavirus. “Contrary to skeptics who claim that COVID-19 deaths are fake or that the numbers are much smaller than we hear on the news, our research and many other studies on the same subject show quite the opposite,” says Woolf in a VCU release. He’s a professor in the medical school’s family medicine and population health department and is director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health. The data-driven study looked at federal health statistics from 2014 to 2020. The pandemic probably fueled some unexpected consequences that added to the death count, from overdoses and suicides to deaths from chronic diseases such as diabetes because patients failed to receive proper care. “Some people who never had the virus may have died because of disruptions caused by the pandemic,” says Woolf.
See more on the local impact of the pandemic and profiles of some Richmond-area residents as they continue to recover from severe bouts with the coronavirus in our recent feature, "A Long, Dark Road."
