West Virginia’s COVID-19 numbers have continued to get worse in recent months and the state just reached a new pandemic high for active patients being treated in intensive care units.
At least 252 COVID-19 patients are in the ICU and 132 are on ventilators, which are both higher than the state has seen since the beginning of the pandemic. There are 813 people hospitalized with the virus, which is only five patients away from reaching the state’s all-time high.
“Our hospitals are still overwhelmingly inundated with cases of people that are not vaccinated,” Gov. Jim Justice said in a statement. “Ninety percent of people in ICUs are unvaccinated. For God’s sake, how difficult is this to understand? What we should be doing is right there in front of us. We just need to use good sense and get ourselves vaccinated.”
With access to vaccines, most states have curbed the spread of the virus despite reopening the economy, but West Virginia’s low vaccination rates have made that difficult. The state’s case acceleration has vastly outpaced every other state in the country with 2.69 cases per 100,000 people per week per day, which is 60% higher than South Dakota, which has the second highest acceleration rate.
“What we’re seeing here in West Virginia right now is exactly what we would expect,” State Coronavirus Czar Dr. Clay Marsh said in a statement. “The delta variant has entered that explosive growth phase, where enough people who are unvaccinated are infected that they can infect other people that are largely unvaccinated. Just like if you have a big, roaring fire, the fire might start off in a few places, but after awhile, if you have enough dry timber and have too few number of firewalls, that fire can start to consume more and more of the of the forest, and start to join in to create one, raging fire. That’s exactly what I believe we’re experiencing right now in West Virginia. And, as the Governor has said, the way to generate the firewalls is vaccination. There’s really no other intervention that works as well as that.”
Less than 60% of the state’s eligible population are fully vaccinated, but more than 73% have received at least one dose of the vaccine. Nearly 73% of residents aged 50 or older have been fully vaccinated and nearly 86% have received at least one dose. More than 80% of those aged 65 or older have been fully vaccinated and about 92% have received at least one dose of the vaccine.
