One in three Virginia COVID tests comes back positive over the last week

RICHMOND, Va. (WDBJ) - The Virginia Department of Health is reporting 1,202,727 cases of COVID-19 across the commonwealth as of Thursday, January 6, 2022, dating to the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. That’s up 15,840 from Wednesday’s reported 1,186,887, a bigger increase than the 10,728 new cases reported Wednesday.

Per the latest update from the state’s vaccine dashboard, 14,148,331 doses of vaccine have been administered in Virginia as of Thursday. 77.7% of the state’s population have gotten at least one dose, with 67.8% fully vaccinated. 89% of Virginians 18 and over have received at least one dose and 78.2% are fully vaccinated.

VACCINE INFO: What you need to know in southwest Virginia

VDH website offers COVID vaccine info

VDH expands COVID testing across Virginia

COVID-19 map tracks current hot spots

Since the pandemic began, 11,369,724 PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests have been conducted in Virginia as of Thursday, with a 33.6% positivity rate from those tests over the last week, up from the 32.2% reported Wednesday.

As of Thursday, there have been 15,642 recorded coronavirus-related deaths in the commonwealth since the pandemic’s beginning, up from the 15,631 reported Wednesday.

3,094 people across Virginia were hospitalized as of Thursday with confirmed or test-pending cases of COVID-19, up from the 2,965 reported Wednesday. 80,449 COVID patients have been released from hospitals in Virginia since the beginning of the pandemic. That’s according to the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association, which gets a daily report from hospitals around the commonwealth.

The hospital numbers are different from those reported by VDH, which only gathers hospitalization status at the time each case is investigated by VDH and is an under-representation of Virginia hospitalizations.

Any new confirmed cases from health departments throughout the state the rest of the day won’t show up until at least the following day on the state list, as the official numbers are only updated once a day, with a 5 p.m. cutoff each day for new cases to be reflected on the next day’s list.