This article was republished with permission from WTOP’s news partner InsideNoVa.com. Sign up for InsideNoVa.com’s free email subscription today.
This article was written by WTOP’s news partner InsideNoVa.com and republished with permission. Sign up for InsideNoVa.com’s free email subscription today.
The Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association will discontinue its COVID-19 dashboard on Thursday.
The dashboard was first made available in April 2020 and has been updated daily with information from Virginia hospitals about the number of hospitalizations for COVID-19 cases. The information is available statewide and by region. It also includes the number of COVID-19 patients on ventilators and in intensive care units.
The dashboard has been viewed more than 7.7 million times, the association said in a statement Wednesday. “[It] has been an invaluable resource to help health care providers, state and federal government partners, the public and the news media gain a clearer picture of the impact of the pandemic on hospitals and the health care delivery system.”
As of Wednesday, the dashboard showed that just 147 patients in Virginia hospitals had confirmed cases of COVID-19, with 16 of those in intensive-care units and fewer than 11 on ventilators. (For privacy reasons, exact numbers were not provided when the count was less than 11.)
In the Northern Virginia region, only 27 patients were hospitalized, with fewer than 11 in ICUs and on ventilators.
Those numbers are at their lowest levels since the pandemic began, although they did hit similar lows in the summer of 2021 and the late winter of 2022.
The hospital association cited those low numbers, as well as the scheduled end of the federal COVID-19 emergency on May 11, as reasons for ending the dashboard.
In Northern Virginia, hospitalizations peaked at 990 on Jan. 14, 2022. This past winter, they peaked at 292 in mid-January. Statewide, hospitalizations peaked at 3,790 in mid-January 2022. This winter, the peak of 1,196 was hit in early January.
COVID-19 case information continues to be available on the Virginia Department of Health’s dashboard, which is updated every Tuesday. As of April 25, the statewide average of new COVID-19 cases being reported to the health department is 214 a day, the lowest level since the summer of 2021. In Northern Virginia, the average is only 55 a day, also the lowest since summer 2021.
