Tag Archives: COVID-19

Beech Tree Elementary to the rescue! When Beech Tree mother Van Nguyen heard about the shortage of medical face masks, she put her sewing skills into action and produced 20 masks. Local medical professional pleaded for more. Then Beech Tree 5th grader Caroline joined the effort. Learning how to sew from her mother and YouTube tutorials, she has completed three face masks and has 30 more in production, reports the Fairfax County Public School community relations staff.

Scanning for fevers, donating masks. Based on its experiences dealing with the COVID-19 situation in China and Singapore, Micron Technology, which operates a semiconductor manufacturing plant in Manassas, is using noninvasive thermal scanners to determine if entering employees have a fever.  Sick employees can be told to return home. The company responded early to the epidemic, increasing site-cleaning rotations, making changes to cafeteria serving, and restricting large gatherings. The company is sharing its experience with other major employers across Virginia — and joining other firms, such as Huntington Ingalls, the Newport News shipbuilder, in donating personal protective gear to healthcare workers, reports Stephen Moret, CEO of the Virginia Economic Development in a recent communication to economic development partners.

Another $1 million for tests. The Charlottesville-based Quantitative Foundation has donated $1 million to UVA Health to accelerate the number of tests performed by the health system from 200 daily to more than 500. The grant provides for putting aside a portion for inpatients at other Virginia hospitals and for clinical providers and first responders with symptoms. Prior to the deployment of UVA Health’s in-house testing, patients were waiting five to nine days for results. Thanks to the UVA Health’s ability to produce its own tests, local turnaround time has been cut to 24 hours.

A limited number of trained personnel has constrained the ability of UVA Health to administer tests. The hospital system’s lab is using the grant to add a new lab tech position. That, in addition to the current cross-training of existing laboratory personnel, reports UVAToday, will allow testing in a second shift. The funds will also be used to order a second robotic instrument which, when installed, will further increase capacity.

— JAB

The Virginia Department of Health has published yesterday’s COVID-19 numbers, and they continue to show a rapidly spreading epidemic.

Total confirmed cases (the tip of the iceberg) have risen to 460, an increase of 69 from the previous day.

The number of hospitalizations has risen to 65, an increase of six from the day before.

The number of deaths has leaped to 13, up from nine.

The number of tests has surged to 6,189, up 819.

— JAB

Alex Krist

by James A. Bacon

The Washington region, including Northern Virginia, is a looming epicenter of the COVID-19 epidemic. Known coronavirus cases in the metropolitan area now exceed 1,000, according to the Washington Post. And it will surprise no one to know that the number of cases confirmed by medical tests represents the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

Of the 25 patients he has seen so far this week, says Dr. Alex Krist, a Fairfax County primary care physician, he would say that five of them carried the COVID-19 virus. They had coughs, shortness of breath, chest pains, and fever — and a week-and-a-half ago they’d been to New York. Given the shortage of test kits, however, they didn’t qualify to be tested. In Northern Virginia, he says, tests are being used not for epidemiological purposes (to track the spread of the disease) but as a screening device to determine if patients are appropriate candidates for ICUs and respirators.

Things will get much worse in Virginia before they get better, says Krist, a Virginia Commonwealth University research professor who chairs the U.S Preventive Service Task Force.

Spurred by emergency conditions, Northern Virginia hospitals and doctors are changing the way they practice medicine, Krist tells Bacon’s Rebellion. “We’re going to run out of hospital beds. We’re going to start trying to treat people at home.” Continue reading →

ICU beds per 100,000 people aged 60 and older, by hospital referral region

As Virginians try to formulate rational COVID-19 policy, it would be helpful to know how many ICU beds there are in Virginia hospitals. We’ve got a handle on the count of acute-care beds, but the number of ICU beds, reserved for the most critically ill patients, is perhaps an even more critical. Virginia public health authorities have not released that number, as far as I can tell, and I can’t find the data on the Internet. However, the Wall Street Journal did obtain data for ICU beds in Virginia’s hospital referral regions and published the map above showing ICU beds per 100,000 people aged 60 and older.

Here’s a close-up of Virginia:

The Washington Post breaks it down a little differently: ICU beds per 10,000 Americans aged 16 and over. The WaPo provides the following numbers for Virginia HRRs:

Arlington — 2.3
Lynchburg — 2.5
Winchester 2.5
Charlottesville — 3.2
Norfolk — 3.3
Richmond — 3.5
United States average — 3.6
Newport News — 3.6
Roanoke — 4.7