Today’s statewide COVID-19 hospitalization count of 3,329 is a one-day Virginia record since the pandemic began, eclipsing the previous one-day peak of 3,201 hospitalizations on Jan. 13, 2021.
COVID-19 hospitalizations in the Commonwealth are up 194 percent in the past month, per a release from the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association. And hospitalizations are up across all regions of the Commonwealth, with significant increases recently documented in the Central, Eastern and Northern regions.
The effect of this is hospitals across Virginia are being forced to make operational adjustments related to things like visitation restrictions, scaling back or postponing non-emergency procedures, adjustments to staff deployment, and more to respond to the current and evolving circumstances of the pandemic.
As adaptable as hospitals have been, it is important to remember that the health care delivery system does not have unlimited resources – for instance, staffing challenges that pre-dated the pandemic have been magnified due to various factors including staff who are sidelined while isolated/quarantining due to illness or exposure.
The current situation is serious, and if things remain on the current trajectory for an extended period – particularly, hospitalizations, which as a metric tend to slightly lag behind rising case counts, and some of the modeling projections suggest that this current surge may not yet have reached the point where it will crest and begin to recede – we could face the possibility of straining the limits of the system’s capacity.
A way to mitigate this: unvaccinated Virginians need to get vaccinated and boosted as a way to reduce their risk of infection and/or serious illness that leads to hospitalization, both for individual, family, and community health and so as not to further strain hospitals and their team members on the frontlines of the pandemic.
Data continues to show that a majority of patients currently hospitalized for COVID-19 are not fully vaccinated.
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Chris Graham
