Coronavirus Story Archives - Page 53 of 54 - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Tracking the coronavirus around the U.S.: See how your state is doing

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This page is updated regularly.

More than 6.5 million people in the U.S. have been infected with the coronavirus and more than 200,000 have died. Tens of thousands of new cases are reported daily nationwide. In the graphics below, explore the trends in your state.

View the data via a heat map (immediately below), , a of state-by-state trends over four weeks, or a of total cases and deaths.

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The map above shows the risk of infection in each state based on new daily cases per capita. These color-coded risk levels were developed by a consortium of researchers and public health experts.

The group advises states in the red category to issue stay-home orders. Orange states may need to consider stay-home orders, along with increased testing and contact tracing. Yellow states need to keep up social distancing and mask usage, and both yellow and green states should continue testing and contact tracing.

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To compare state outbreaks, the chart above graphs trend lines for average new daily cases and deaths against each state’s totals to date. This type of visualization highlights a state’s daily growth or decline relative to the overall size of its outbreak.

When both new and total case and death counts grow quickly, the curves bend upward. As new cases and deaths slow, the curves level or bend down. In New York, the curve rose sharply before reaching over 170,000 total cases in April. Since then, new cases have fallen from about 10,000 per day in mid-April to under 800 per day in late September.

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Explore the map above to see totals and per capita figures around the country for both new confirmed cases and reported deaths from COVID-19. New York was the original epicenter of the pandemic in the U.S. As of mid August, California, Florida and Texas have surpassed New York for total cases to date, though New York still has the highest death total.

Click here to see a global map of confirmed cases and deaths.

To show trends, the table below shows the change in average new cases per day in each state, week over week for the last 28 days. States marked in shades of red have growing outbreaks; those in shades of green, are declining.

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Methodology

The graphics on this page pull from data compiled by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University from several sources, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; the World Health Organization; national, state and local government health departments; ; and local media reports.

The JHU team automates its data uploads and regularly checks them for anomalies. This may result in occasional data discrepancies on this page as the JHU team resolves anomalies and updates its feeds. State-by-state recovery data are unavailable at this time. There may be discrepancies between what you see here and what you see on your local health department’s website. Figures shown do not include cases on cruise ships.

In early June, Michigan health authorities started including probable cases in its totals. This resulted in a brief spike in the state’s daily numbers until the JHU team was able to reconcile the historical data. On June 25, New Jersey included 1,854 previously-unreported probable deaths in its totals, resulting in a spike in the state’s daily death numbers.

This story was originally published on March 16, 2020. Elena Renken was a co-author on that version.

Sean McMinn contributed to and Carmel Wroth edited this story.

Charleston, W.Va. Declares State Of Emergency As Part Of Coronavirus Response

Updated Sunday, March 15, 2020 at 9:50 p.m. Check back here for the latest coverage on the coronavirus.

The city of Charleston, West Virginia, has declared a state of emergency as part of its response to the coronavirus. According to a news release, Mayor Amy Goodwin signed a proclamation Sunday that allows city officials to issue emergency policies and mobilize resources such as personnel, services and equipment.

Charleston’s state of emergency was issued despite West Virginia reporting no confirmed cases of the virus. The proclamation was issued moments before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the suspension of gatherings of 50 or more people for the next eight weeks.

However, testing in the state has been extremely limited. West Virginia health officials say 41 residents have been tested for the disease. As of Sunday at 9:50 p.m., 38 tests yielded negative results with three results still pending. Those numbers do not account for testing conducted by some hospitals or commercial laboratories.

Goodwin said the threat of the coronavirus and its likely inevitable spread in West Virginia could force municipalities such as Charleston to enact lockdowns. She said the emergency declaration would allow her and other city officials to put a lockdown in place should it become necessary.

“I think that West Virginians need to plan and prepare for that to happen,” Goodwin said by phone Sunday night. “[They need to] plan and prepare for social distancing for quite some time; to plan and prepare for this virus to wreak havoc in the state of West Virginia with our businesses and our lives for quite some time.”

City officials say the state of emergency will remain in place until a similar proclamation is issued to rescind the measure. Goodwin said she would rather enact policies that keep residents safe than look back and wish she had done more.

“Somebody yelled at me across the street the other day, they said, ‘Mayor, are we overreacting?’ And my response to them was ‘Boy, I hope so. But, unfortunately, I don’t think so,’” Goodwin said Sunday night by phone. “As mayor, it’s my responsibility. It’s my job to ensure that if we need to make critical decisions, life-saving decisions, at a moment’s notice that we’re able to do that – and I can’t wait on the state or anyone else to do that for our city. We need to do it ourselves.”

Gov. Jim Justice said in a Friday news conference that he believes the virus — which has, as of Sunday night, stricken more than 162,000 people globally and caused more than 6,000 deaths — is in West Virginia but has not been detected.

“We know it’s here,” Justice said. “ I mean, let’s be real. It has to be here. We just haven’t found it yet.”

Justice and other state officials have taken various steps to mitigate the spread of coronavirus, including closing schools until at least March 27, and suspending visitations at state corrections centers. Universities around the state have also extended their respective spring breaks and are transitioning to online learning environments. The governor has announced a news conference to be held Monday at 2 p.m. to update the status of the state’s response to the pandemic.

Along with the issuance of Charleston’s state of emergency, Mayor Goodwin said Monday’s scheduled meeting of the city council would be held electronically.

“I was very limited in my way of being able to ask members to stay to stay at home,” Goodwin said. “We can still have counsel, we just need to do it online. Without this declaration, I was not able to do that.”

With an estimated population of just over 47,000 residents, Charleston is West Virginia’s largest city and the state capital.

'We Can't Get To Everybody': Hospital Closures, Underfunded Health Centers Hinder COVID-19 Response

Local public health departments and hospitals are on the front lines of facing the coronavirus throughout the Ohio Valley, yet the health professionals…

Local public health departments and hospitals are on the front lines of facing the coronavirus throughout the Ohio Valley, yet the health professionals who run these facilities say years of underfunding and hospital closures have diminished these services that now face the crisis.

Dan Brown, a former councilman for the riverside village of Bellaire, Ohio, believes the emergency management services in his community and Belmont County are strong in facing the coronavirus, with several volunteer fire departments in “spitting distance” from his village. But that’s not what he’s worried about.

Belmont Community Hospital in Bellaire closed last April, and five miles upriver, East Ohio Regional Hospital and Ohio Valley Medical Center near Wheeling, West Virginia, closed their doors. One hospital remains in Wheeling.

“The number of beds have gone down so dramatically. I can’t imagine if we had any kind of outbreak, with a two percent or five percent fatality rate, we’re in deep trouble,” Brown said. “The whole thing is setting up for failure.”

Even before the pandemic, Brown said, the hospital closures meant that those in communities near Bellaire would have to travel farther to receive services like kidney dialysis, and he’s concerned a similar situation could happen with the current outbreak. On Friday, Belmont County officials confirmed two cases of the novel coronavirus.

One nurse in the upper Ohio Valley said her hospital is already dealing with a spike of patients and concerns about lacking resources. Megan Carroll works at Trinity Health System in Steubenville, Ohio, and was a nurse at East Ohio Regional Hospital before it closed.

“Resources are limited. Testing is limited. Staffing is limited, and of course beds are limited. Any potential outbreak, including the one that’s happening now will devastate resources,” Carroll said. “The public is irritated. They want treatment, but we can’t get to everybody all at once.”

As of Friday afternoon, she said her hospital is already having emergency room patients waiting six to seven hours to be seen by staff, and staff are establishing quarantine rooms for anybody who is suspected to have coronavirus.

Nearly 20 percent of more than 100 rural hospital closures across the country since 2010 have been in Appalachia, according to the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Hospitals are not the only important piece of the public health infrastructure to be diminished around the Ohio Valley. Officials say other vital parts of these public health systems now facing stress from the coronavirus could have been fortified years before.

Underfunded, Overworked

Under normal circumstances, Jim Tolley’s public health department would conduct restaurant inspections and help couples plan to raise families. But these aren’t normal circumstances.

Tolley, interim director for the Pennyrile District Health Department in west Kentucky, gave stern recommendations to school district superintendents, elected officials and hospital staff, during a regional meeting Thursday.

For example, nursing homes should limit visitors, hospitals should review plans in handling a spike of patients, and school districts should prepare for the governor to close schools. Later that day, Kentucky’s governor requested schools do just that.

But with a crisis like coronavirus, he’s strapped for resources and manpower. His public health department, covering several counties, is working with half the staff he had in 2012.

Three out of his five county health centers in west Kentucky that provide clinical care had to close one day out of the week to maintain services. And a report last year showed his department within 12 months of financial insolvency due to poor state funding and the state’s pension troubles.

Jim Tolley (right) addresses local leaders in west Kentucky.

He’s had to cut back even more on services his department provides to divert toward addressing the coronavirus. And millions of dollars of emergency federal funding could come months too late to help.

“When these events come up and we don’t have the staffing that we need, it shows the importance of having some reserve,” Tolley said. “They can send the money out, but it takes years to get a public health nurse fully trained.”

American Water To Stop Water Shut Offs As COVID-19 Precaution

One of West Virginia’s largest public water utilities announced Friday it is making adjustments because of the potential spread of coronavirus.

In a press release West Virginia American Water announced it will discontinue shutting off water for customers who have not paid their bills. Water turned off prior to March 12 will be restored, although it could take several days.

This will include services like sewer utilities that do not directly come from American water, but wastewater providers contracted with the company. According to the release, scheduled shut offs from these providers may still take place, but should be restored in the coming days.

Meghan Hannah, external affairs manager for WV American Water, said the move comes as a health and safety precaution in efforts to slow the spread of coronavirus, despite there being no reported cases in West Virginia yet.

“Allowing folks to be able to wash their hands and take a shower to hopefully eliminate or eradicate the spread of this virus,” she said.

Hannah said costs will accrue as normal during the shut offs and can be paid at a later date.

American Water meets all current federal and state drinking water requirements; and drinking water is treated to remove or kill viruses, according to the release.

The company provides water to about 550,000 West Virginians.

WVU Health Sciences VP Outlines Readiness For COVID-19, Notes Challenges In Other Countries

Check back here for the latest coverage on the coronavirus.

West Virginia officials continue to try to stave off the effects of an outbreak of the novel coronavirus in the state — despite no confirmed cases being announced by health officers. As the potential for a diagnosis appears inevitable, those involved in the response to the pandemic are hoping to mitigate its spread and prevent stresses on the state’s health care system.

Is our health care system equipped to handle what lies ahead? How can West Virginia prevent stresses that have occured in other countries?

West Virginia University Health Sciences Vice President and Executive Dean Clay Marsh is one of those involved with planning the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Editor’s Note: The following has been edited for clarity and length.

Clay Marsh: My role, specifically — but, really, our role as a university and as a health care delivery system WVU medicine — is to try to make sure that we are both giving our communities and community member the best advice on how to avoid becoming infected with the novel coronavirus or COVID-19 as it’s called. But, also, to try to reduce the surge, the stress, on our health care system. So that if people do become ill, that we will have enough health care workers to be able to treat them and will have enough health care resources to be able to handle, perhaps, the increased volume of very sick people that we could see related to this pandemic virus.

Dave Mistich: You mentioned having enough health care workers. West Virginia’s rural hospitals have been closing at an alarming rate. Do you see issues between the rural — and it’s not necessarily urban in West Virginia — but the more equipped cities and towns in the state for something like this?

Marsh: I think that this is a really unusual time. And let me just explain very briefly why this is different than anything that we’ve ever seen — at least in all of our lifetimes. So this is a virus that has jumped from an animal source to a human source. This is a bat-borne virus that is related to regular cold viruses. There are coronaviruses that are regular cold viruses and the regular coronaviruses we respond to, and they make us sick a little bit, but then we’ll get over it.

This novel coronavirus, the one that jumped from bats to us is really more like the SARS virus that we saw a few years ago. But this one is different in that we have no native immunity to it. And it turns out that when we get infected with it we don’t know we’re infected with it, but we can transmit the virus. So, the problem then becomes that some people that may not even feel very many symptoms, they may be able to spread the virus to other people.

What’s happened is — and this is really now Italy’s experience if you look around the world — Italy didn’t do as, perhaps, an aggressive an approach in trying to reduce person-to-person contact and these public health measures of asking people to self-quarantine if they may have come from an area where the coronavirus is more prevalent.

But Italy now has gotten to the point where they’ve closed their borders. They have basically told people to stay in their homes. At their health care system, they basically have critically ill people in the hallways of their hospitals — and they’re making some triage decisions about whether to apply the critical care equipment like ventilators and support devices to people because they don’t have enough of them. Their health care workers have also gotten sick — some of them — which further stresses their system.

So, this surge effect on their health care system has created an almost collapse of that system. And the mortality rate right now in Italy is six percent. If you look at influenza virus, it’s 0.5 percent. And this has been a pretty significant influenza year. Still influenza kills more people than this novel coronavirus. Across the world, about two percent of people it’s estimated or maybe less will die from the novel coronavirus. Usually people that are older — 70s and 80 year olds. But when you look at the pandemic of 1918, which was another novel virus, that time the H1N1 virus, the mortality rate and that was 2.5 percent — across the world 50 to 100 million people during the pandemic of 1918.

Mistich: So, all that being said, West Virginia’s rural hospitals are closing at an alarming rate… is Morgantown better equipped than Fairmont Regional (a hospital that recently announced it was closing) — the region of Fairmont — or Wheeling?

Marsh: Of course. So what we’re really doing and this is the leadership of the state and, and our state health officer, Cathy Slemp, is doing a wonderful job and Secretary Bill Crouch and certainly the governor and the governor’s office and the local health department’s with the academic centers, the medical schools, the hospital systems — we’re all working together.

So the thought would be that — although, we do have more capabilities and Morgantown than say you would in Fairmont right now — we all want to pull together and we’re all part of a single state. We believe our role here is to help anybody in this state, whether that’s helping an individual citizen or helping another health system, a smaller hospital system or set of clinics that need our help. And we’re trying to do that in a way we’re all pulling in the same direction and working in series versus parallel.

Mistich: How’s West Virginia doing as far as testing? What’s our capabilities? What’s the criteria? Because, the way I understand it — if I feel sick — I just can’t walk into the hospital and say, ‘Test me for coronavirus,’ right?

Marsh: It’s getting more like that today. And obviously we want to have a doctor or a health care workers order or asking for that kind of test. When the novel coronavirus first came here to the United States, we had a limit and how we could test so it really got centralized that the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

It’s recently been liberalized and we have many more tests that we’re capable of running to the state level — and we believe very soon we’ll have those at the local level. So there are private companies like Labcorp and Quest Diagnostics that can run these tests.

The test is a relatively straightforward test to run — that is done all the time. And what you’re looking for is the RNA, the genetic material from this virus that’s very unique. And you’re trying to amplify that. And that tells you that somebody has been exposed and has been infected with a virus. And if it’s negative, it means you haven’t been exposed or haven’t been infected with a virus and trying to bring that down to the local levels.

South Korea, as a country, they tested very broadly. And part of the way that they started to control the infection is — instead of just asking everybody to self-quarantine, if you’ve had any potential exposure — they started to test a ton of their population. So they actually knew who was infected and who wasn’t. And, optimally, you find that out and you quarantine the people that are infected. You don’t quarantine the people who aren’t. So that’s really a step that we’re moving toward, which will allow us, I think, to be much smarter about how we’re approaching this from a public health protection standpoint.

Governor Orders All W.Va. Schools Closed Beginning Monday

Updated March 15, 2020 at 9:00 p.m.

Although no cases of the novel coronavirus have been found in West Virginia yet, Gov. Jim Justice announced Friday, March 13, all West Virginia schools are to close on Monday as a precaution.

Schools will remain closed until at least Friday, March 27th, according to a joint announcement from the governor’s office and the state Department of Education.

No return date for students has been set, but essential staff, determined by each county board of education, are working Monday through Wednesday to develop plans for students.

Essential personnel includes transportation, custodial staff, and food service staff who are working to ensure child nutrition efforts continue for the over 200,000 students who rely on school meals for their daily nutrition. County boards of education are authorized to use school busses to transport meals to students throughout the duration of the closure.

All teachers, staff, and school service personnel will report to work Thursday, March 19 and Friday, March 20.

County leadership teams are considering several approaches to ensure education continues for students, including distance learning, telecommunication, electronic communication, and traditional paper instructional packets.

The West Virginia National Guard and the West Virginia Department of Agriculture say they are also prepared to support counties however they need.

Updated March 13, 2020 at 5:16 p.m.

The governor said the decision did not come easily, and, in fact, was not made until shortly before the 11 a.m. press conference. Ultimately, he told reporters, he decided closing all public schools was a way to try and get ahead of a probable coronavirus outbreak.

“We’ve got a monster that’s looming, but the monster’s not here,” Justice said. “Every single one of us believes the monster is coming to some degree.”

Justice said one concern is that children who have not been as susceptible to the most dangerous effects of the disease as the elderly, would unwittingly pass the virus to grandparents, older teachers or caregivers.

Officials in Kentucky, Maryland and Ohio, among many other states, have moved to close public schools to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. Justice noted even though West Virginia does not yet have any confirmed cases of the new disease, it has a large vulnerable, elderly population.

“The one thing we’ve got in West Virginia that maybe just maybe those states may not have in the magnitude of what we have is the elderly,” he said. “You know we’re an older state, and the elderly is where this monster attacks.”

But closing schools comes with huge challenges. For many kids, especially those who are housing insecure or have been impacted by the opioid epidemic, school is a safe space. Clayton Burch, state superintendent of schools, said the state Department of Education is keeping those students in mind.

“It’s where they have structure, it’s where they do have a safe environment,” Burch said. “It’s also where many of them are fed. About 200,000 rely on breakfast and lunch through the school and you put that together with the additional services beyond just the education we offer, our schools are a beacon for them.”

In a Friday news release, U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin said that the U.S. Department of Agriculture has approved a waiver application from the West Virginia Office of Child Nutrition to continue feeding students even though school would not be in session. Burch said they are currently working with the National Guard and other community resources like food pantries on how meals would be distributed.

“Some districts will utilize buses, they can even utilize the bus stops,” Burch said. “Kentucky right now is utilizing a drive through mechanism for families when they can, can actually come and pick up the meals and then we’ll also tap into resources like [West Virginia National Guard Adjutant General James] Hoyer said to utilize others to assist with some of that delivery.”

Students are not the only ones who will be impacted by school closures — working parents are in for a hard time too. When asked if he had instructions for employers across the state, many of whom will have employees impacted by the school closures, Justice called for state and federal support, but didn’t provide many details.

“Our nation and our state is going to have to really step up beyond the call here,” Justice said. “I don’t know all the intricacies of how that step up means. But in this situation to where we’re basically putting undue hardship on hardships on families, or, or maybe if you’re feeling bad, you don’t really think you ought to be at work and we’re telling you to stay home and then you stay home and you lose a day or five days pay, and you can’t pay for your electric bill and whatever like that.”

Water utility American Water and power utilities FirstEnergy Corp. and Appalachian Power said Friday they would suspend service shut offs, at least temporarily, during the outbreak.

One of the criticisms or arguments against closing schools is that kids are going to congregate anyway, said Superintendent Burch. “I have four children of my own,” he said. “I will guarantee you that I will have a text when we finish that says ‘what can we do this evening?’ They’re going to congregate. I think it’s just our job to keep preaching those good messages about if they’re going to be around others are they practicing good hygiene? Are they covering their mouth? Are they washing their hands?”

As for how long schools will stay closed, Justice didn’t give a definite answer — rather saying — “we’ll close the schools as long as we have to close the schools.”

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from Marshall Health and Charleston Area Medical Center.