West Virginia Governor Jim Justice just announced the first confirmed case COVID-19 in the state.
Gov. Jim Justice announced the update Tuesday during a statewide address. The person who tested positive lives in the Eastern Panhandle.
The governor said he is closing restaurants and bars and casinos. Restaurants will still be able to offer take-out service.
Before anyone pulls out any broad generalizations or stereotypes, state health officials have been monitoring for cases for some time now, and have been taking the COVID-19 threat relatively seriously.
State health officials previously said they believed the coronavirus was already here in the Mountain State but had just not been identified through testing.
Although the state has been testing for the virus, like many other US states, it has been limited in how many tests it could administer, despite a large high-risk population
"We've only had 84 tests in my state" as of Monday, said Joe Manchin, the state's senior senator.
"I have over 720,000 elderly. I've got over 220,000 that are critically ill under 60 years of age," Manchin said. "If you put all this together, of the
1,800,000 people (living in West Virginia), I have over a million that could be absolutely, totally devastated by this virus if it hits."
The news of the first confirmed case comes conspicuously after earlier in the day when Trump made some misguided public remarks about why West Virginia had not yet detected any cases
“Big Jim, the governor” — referring to Gov. Jim Justice, whose flip to the Republican Party was celebrated by Trump — “he must be doing a good job of that. That’s what’s reported. … West Virginia is the only one that has no cases. So obviously that’s being treated differently than a New York or California.”
Well, that’s not obviously the case, in fact. There are a number of reasons West Virginia may not have any reported cases — and why it may have cases that haven’t been documented.
The problem here should be obvious. Trump is praising the state and Justice for their handling of the outbreak, but there’s no reason to think that the state’s actions are themselves actually preventing the spread of disease. It may be that the lack of population density in much of the state plays a role, as does the limited number of cases of people seeding the virus. But it’s also almost certainly true that there are cases that haven’t been detected yet, meaning that what the state is doing isn’t preventing cases anyway.
Let’s hope that’s not the case. No state has a higher density of its population that is at higher risk from the virus than Justice’s. Half of the state’s residents are either over 60 years old or have a health condition that means they might face complications should they contract covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
With this, all 50 states now have at least one confirmed case of COVID-19.
As we all know, most states have enacted extreme measures to encourage people to stay home and slow the spread of the virus, to prevent over-burdening the USA’s fragile health system similar to what is happening in Italy.
But for reasons that are actually in complete opposite to what Trump claims, the situation in West Virginia only emphasizes the one critical factor where Trump’s response has been utterly abysmal, and will, frankly, lead to a lot of people dying: increasing testing immediately.