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Nearly one-third of Virginia's 231 COVID-19 deaths have occurred among Henrico County residents – 74 of whom have died from the disease – Henrico Health Director Danny Avula announced this evening at a press briefing.
Health Department officials had not previously announced the death count by jurisdiction. Forty-nine of the deaths occurred among residents of the Canterbury Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center in Henrico's West End. Details about most of the others are unknown.
In Henrico, about half the 532 confirmed cases (a total that ranks third in the state, behind Fairfax and Prince William counties) have occurred among blacks, about 37 percent among whites and about 4 percent among other groups, with 9 percent unknown, Avula said.
The 74 deaths have been nearly evenly split among – about 46 percent among whites, 45 percent among blacks, 4 percent among others and 4 percent unknown, he said.
Blacks make up about 31 percent of Henrico’s overall population, while whites represent 57 percent.
“The data tells us that African Americans are carrying a higher burden of the disease than their counterparts. It is indicative of the underlying underlying health disparities that we have known about for a long time.”
Avula reported that outbreaks of the virus (defined as two or more cases) now have occurred at 18 senior communities in Henrico and Richmond, whose health district he also leads. He suggested that more are likely.
“There’s not much that we have been able to do to really prevent these outbreaks in long-term care facilities,” he said. “It’s not because people are doing anything wrong, it’s because this disease seems to transmit much more than we realized at the beginning of this pandemic before you have symptoms. There’s just no way to put up a defense against asymptomatic transmission in facilities that weren’t built for that degree of infection control.”
Avula, though, said he suspected that the majority of outbreaks in senior communities were the result of infected asymptomatic employees carrying the virus in unknowingly.
“The reality that you are spreading disease before you know you have it is what is making it next to impossible for facilities to keep it out,” he said.
Avula envisions a day on which staffers will show up to work and undergo a finger-prick or other quick test to determine whether they are carriers on the spot, but he said that day is a long way away.
Health department officials are not legally able to mention names of senior facilities at which cases have been confirmed or deaths have occurred without their permission, Avula said, and some are now leery of giving that permission for fear of negative publicity.
On Tuesday, Avula’s department will begin taking virus testing operations to lower-income communities in the county on a daily weekday basis for the next month. They hope to test between 100 and 200 people each day in those spots, he said. A specific schedule doesn’t yet exist, but as Avula told the Citizen earlier this week, larger communities with which his department already has strong relationships (such as St. Luke Apartments adjacent to Richmond Raceway, and Henrico Arms, just off Darbytown Road near the Richmond line) are likely to be among the first locations.
