Ahead of governor's mask mandate, VA has no way of knowing the number of active infections in state

Virginia health officials have acknowledged that the state has no way of knowing how many coronavirus cases are active in the state because they doesn't track the number of patient who have recovered from the infection.

Virginia's COVID-19 dashboard as of Tuesday morning lists 4,325 hospitalizations, 1,236 deaths and just over 39,000 confirmed and probable cases.

Julie Grimes, a spokeswoman with the state health department, confirmed that the state does not presently track coronavirus recoveries, saying the issue lies in trying to determine if and when a patient has indeed recovered.

"I'm not sure the (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) have come up with a definition of what constitutes a 'recovered COVID patient'," she told Just the News.

Grimes also cited federal guidance on when patients can come out of self-isolation, including the directive that individuals "should follow their healthcare providers' recommendations about when they can consider themselves symptom-free."

Asked if Virginia does not have its own definition of what constitutes recovery from COVID-19 and if the state is thus not fully tracking or logging the number of recovered patients against the log of confirmed cases, Grimes responded: "Correct." 

The state health department's website states that "recovery information is not data that the Virginia Department of Health collects. Our data reflect a snapshot in time when the case is reported to us and we are not currently performing subsequent interviews or data collection."

Joe Macenka, a spokesman for Virginia's COVID-19 Joint Information Command, also said Tuesday that he was "not aware of any kind of daily updates to such numbers."

He suggested looking into the number of hospitalizations and discharges in the state as a way to "arrive at a figure." 

The Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association says that as of May 26, a total of 5,227 COVID-19 patients have been hospitalized and discharged in the state. Just over 1,400 are currently hospitalized, with 26% of those in intensive care units. Those numbers do not address the coronavirus patients who were never hospitalized. 

Governor last week teased mask mandate

Meanwhile, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is set Tuesday to issue a mask mandate for anyone entering a place of business anywhere in the state. 

The order comes after a spike of nearly 1,500 confirmed cases on Monday, the highest yet recorded. 

The governor has lately been urging residents to wear face coverings while out in public, though so far he has stopped short of directly ordering them to do so. Northam teased last week that he was planning on forcing state residents to don face coverings to some extent while out and about, telling Virginians on Friday to "make plans for you and your other family members to have facial protection" by today. 

Like Virginia, not every state tracks coronavirus patient recoveries.

"We do not currently measure ‘recovery,’ and don’t expect to have such a designation anytime in the near future," the Florida Department of Health recently stated on its website, claiming that "recovery can mean a lot of things."

Still, numerous other states post their estimated coronavirus recovery stats on their health department websites. Texas, for instance, estimates on its own COVID-19 dashboard that so far that a little over 60% of coronavirus cases there have resulted in recovery. 

Pennsylvania also provides that statistic, currently also estimating a 61% recovery rate so far. 

"Individuals who have recovered is determined using a calculation, similar to what is being done by several other states," the state's website states. "If a case has not been reported as a death, and it is more than 30 days past the date of their first positive test (or onset of symptoms) then an individual is considered recovered."

North Carolina also recently began providing presumed recovery numbers for its coronavirus patients, estimating "a median time to recovery of 14 days from the date of specimen collection for non-fatal COVID-19 cases who were not hospitalized, or if hospitalization status is unknown." The state estimated a median 28 days of recovery for those hospitalized.