HENDERSON — There’s enough COVID-19 going on in the Tri-County that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control once again says the region, along a good part of the rest of North Carolina, is experiencing a high level of infections.
The label comes with the agency’s advice that it’s a good idea to wear a mask indoors in public places, stay up to date on your COVID vaccines and get tested if you have symptoms.
CDC analysts calculated the current metrics on Jan. 12, before the MLK holiday weekend, and leaned on data from roughly the previous week.
The key metric that goes a long way toward pegging all three counties with the “high” level is their COVID case rate.
Analysts look first at whether a county has seen more than 200 new cases per every 100,000 in population over the course of a week. For Vance, Granville and Warren counties, the answer was yes — with Vance having almost 328, Granville about 291 and Warren not quite 269.
The reckoning uses the per-100,000 rate to make it easier to compare large counties with small ones.
Once over the 200-cases threshold, the analysts look at a county’s COVID-related hospital admissions and bed use. If admissions are over 10 per 100,000 people, or COVID patients are using more than 10% of a hospital’s beds, a county gets the “high” label.
The admissions rate is once again the thing that trips up the Tri-County. Vance, Granville and Warren were all above 16 per 100,000.
The N.C. Department of Health and Human Services reports that it knew of 149 cases in Vance County during the last week of 2023, 184 in Granville County and 55 in Warren County.
There have been 310 deaths from the virus in the region since the start of the pandemic in the spring off 2020. The latest was reported in Granville County in mid-December.
State and federal officials are keeping an eye on the emergence of yet another omicron sub-variant of the virus, called XBB.1.5. It’s better able to avoid a person’s immunity than previous variants, according to a Q&A with molecular microbiology and immunology professor Andy Pekosz published by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
He urged people to get the bivalent booster vaccine developed to counter omicron, as it “still does the primary thing we want a vaccine to do: help prevent people from being hospitalized or dying.”
The CDC says only about 11% of Vance County residents, 12% of Granville County residents and 10% of Warren County residents over the age of 5 have gotten the bivalent booster.
