WASHINGTON — It’s Tuesday, December 22, and after months of calls for Congress to act on a second coronavirus stimulus bill, they finally did at the 11th hour.
In the DMV, that means another $800 million to help keep public transit, particularly hard-hit WMATA, afloat and $600 direct payments to individuals making $75,000 a year or less. Our Verify team broke down all the asterisks and caveats on those payments here.
The FDA’s approval of the Moderna vaccine also means more than a quarter of a million doses will be headed to the DMV before the end of the year. I broke down the numbers in yesterday’s blog.
Speaking of numbers… I’ve never had the opportunity to list three good news items in a row in this blog since it started, so a brief note on Maryland’s coronavirus case rate. As of Tuesday, the state of Maryland has seen its seven-day average for new cases decline for more than a week straight. It’s the period with seven or more consecutive days of decline since September.
In case you’re just here for the numbers, here’s where the DMV stands today:
- D.C. reported 160 new cases of the coronavirus and 2 new deaths on Tuesday.
- Maryland reported 2,324 new cases of the coronavirus and 51 new deaths on Tuesday. It’s the fourth time in a week the state has reported more than 50 deaths in a single day.
- Virginia reported 3,591 new cases of the coronavirus on Tuesday and 51 new deaths. The commonwealth has now averaged more than 30 deaths a day for a week straight.
How are things in the DMV?
Back to the bad news.
In D.C., the city is now averaging four deaths a day from the coronavirus for the first time since June. The share of hospitalized patients who are positive for COVID-19 continues increasing as well. As of Tuesday, 11.7% of all hospital patients in the city have the virus.
The city has seen improvement over the last 10 days in its hospital utilization rate – that’s the percentage of all non-surge beds in the city in use. As of Sunday, the most recent date available, that metric had fallen back down to 80.1% from an all-time high of 91% on Dec. 10. Having 80% of hospital beds in use in the city isn’t where the District wants to be – it’s the cutoff point for the yellow zone in that metric – but it takes the city out of the insufficient capacity category.
Hospitalization numbers in Virginia also remain troubling. While Maryland has seen a small drop in hospitalized COVID-19 patients over the past few days, Virginia continues setting new all-time highs. On Tuesday, for the first time since the pandemic began the commonwealth reported more than 2,500 patients hospitalized with COVID-19. Of those, more than 500 were in the ICU, and more than 275 were on ventilators.
As a final thought: If you live in D.C., new restrictions are going into place for the city’s “holiday pause” on Wednesday. You can read about those here.