COVID-19 UPDATE: Gov. Justice adds tanning businesses to list of Week 4 reopenings

Week 4 is currently scheduled to commence on Thursday, May 21.

Tanning businesses will be required to follow additional guidelines to help keep their patrons and all West Virginians as safe as possible. These guidance documents will be provided on The Comeback page of the Governor’s Office website as soon as they become available.

“Our medical experts now feel like we’re good to go with our tanning businesses, so we’re going to bring them back online,” Gov. Justice said.

“I want you to know, if you’re one of the businesses out there that’s still closed, I would ask that you would please try to be patient,” Gov. Justice said. “We’re working it as diligently as we possibly can. We’re trying to bring us back from an economic standpoint, but we have got to remember that we really need to take baby steps in this.

“There’s so many different programs that are out there and I hope you’re utilizing those programs,” Gov. Justice continued. “I ask you to look at these programs and work it as best you possibly can.

“There’s no crystal ball here. All we can do is do absolutely everything we’ve already done: consult with all our leaders throughout the state, depend on our medical experts to give us great guidance, talk nonstop to the federal government and to the President, talk to great medical institutions all across the land. This is what we’re doing every single day to make the right moves on the chessboard and still know, if there’s an outbreak somewhere, we’ll be able to respond quickly.”

WVANG airmen and women flew a C-17 out of the 167th Airlift Wing in Martinsburg and a C-130 out of the 130th Airlift Wing in Charleston, flying over nearly 40 hospitals across the state.

The flyovers were a part of a nationwide salute to those supporting COVID-19 response efforts and served as vital training for both 167th AW and 130th AW pilots and aeromedical evacuation crews. These flights were conducted at no additional cost to taxpayers.

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“These people are on the front lines, fighting this terrible epidemic,” Gov. Justice said. “This week is a time that you should recognize all of our nursing home residents as well and honor them and our nursing home workers for all that they’ve done.

“We’ve all worked together. We were the first state in the nation to test all our nursing homes. We’ve led the way on that and we’re continuing to try to stay on top of this because we know these people are the most vulnerable of all.”

“Our foster kids, for the most part, had already been dealt a really tough hand,” Gov. Justice said. “It is imperative that we are able to continue recruiting people to keep stepping up and taking care of these kids. This pandemic has highlighted that it is tremendously difficult on these families and these kids with them having to stay home, there were lots of safe havens, like schools, that closed. The hardships that these kids and these families are going through right this minute is magnified, in multiples, to what we’re all going through.

“There are many, many out there that are hurting,” Gov. Justice continued. “They’re not invisible. We see them. I want you to see them and just note how precious they are to all of us.”

Read more at missionwv.org.

“I tell you every day to be counted on the Census,” Gov. Justice said. “We’re running out of time, that’s all there is to it.”

Gov. Justice announced that, to this point, Wood County has been the county with the highest response rate in the state at just 64.8 percent. Meanwhile, McDowell County is currently registering the lowest response rate at 4.7 percent.

“That’s not good enough, West Virginia,” Gov. Justice said, calling on county and city leaders to begin stressing the importance of responding. “A lot of our southern counties are low, really low.

“We’ve got to be counted, it is so very important. Because, if we don’t, at the end of the day, it’s going to pull more dollars out of West Virginia that we desperately need. Just think about the flow of COVID-19 dollars that could have come to us if we had been counted better 10 years ago.”

Every West Virginian who does not respond to the Census represents a loss of $20,000 in federal funds over the next 10 years for the state and its local communities. The funds can go toward things like healthcare, education, infrastructure, school lunch programs, and more.

Be counted in minutes: 2020census.gov.

Additionally, the number of active COVID-19 cases in the state has decreased to 477, while the number of people who have recovered from COVID-19 has increased to 855.

West Virginia continues to outpace all of its surrounding states, as well as the national average, in terms of the percentage of population that has been tested. At the same time, West Virginia has the lowest rate of positive tests compared to all of its surrounding states and the national average.

View the latest COVID-19 data at Coronavirus.wv.gov

More information is available at chip.wv.gov.

For more information about COVID-19 prevention and more, call the State’s toll-free hotline at 1-800-887-4304 or visit Coronavirus.wv.gov.