The Virginia Department of Health is continuing efforts to roll out COVID-19 vaccines to people in the 1A group – that’s frontline health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities. But details on the next steps are still being ironed out.During a media briefing Wednesday, VDH Division of Immunization director Christy Gray said officials expect Virginia to get a weekly allocation of about 100,000 vaccine doses over the next few weeks.
And plans are being finalized for rollout to groups 1B and 1C – essential workers and high-risk adults:
“We have requested back from the Virginia Vaccine Advisory Workgroup and those comments were relayed to the Virginia Disaster Medical Advisory Committee for their review," Gray explained. "The committee’s recommendations and the comments will be provided to Virginia Unified Command for final approval this week.”
About 54,300 people in Virginia have received COVID-19 vaccines so far.
That number represents only about 20-percent of the total number of doses the state began receiving from manufacturers two weeks ago. The state has received just over 285,000 doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
Gray says long-term care facility residents began receiving shots this week. Many of them are being vaccinated onsite thanks to a partnership with CVS and Walgreens.
Near Southwest Region Update
The number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients in the western part of the state went up again this week.
381 hospitalizations were recorded in the Health Department’s Near Southwest region. That includes hospitals in Roanoke, Lynchburg, Danville and parts of the New River Valley.
That number is up from the 363 reported last week.
The number of patients in need of a ventilator or intensive care services went down slightly, however.
