ST. CLAIRSVILLE — Expected fallout of new COVID-19 cases from the Thanksgiving holiday and the stress on the state’s hospitals remain a priority during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Belmont County Deputy Health Director Robert Sproul and others of his staff continue the work of contact-tracing people who may have been exposed to the virus, despite Sproul himself and three other staffers having to go into quarantine after being exposed to someone with the virus.

Belmont County has had a total of 2,412 positive cases since the pandemic’s onset, with 1,094 currently isolated with active cases. There have been 1,235 recoveries, 42 people are hospitalized and 41 people have died after being infected. Five of those deaths were reported Monday and Tuesday, and in the past four weeks of the surge the number has increased from 25.

Meanwhile, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine gave his scheduled talk Thursday afternoon, continuing to speak with health workers about the strained intensive care units and the choices hospitals are making to delay non-coronavirus, non-emergency procedures such as diagnostics and surgery for arthritis.

Nora Colburn, medical doctor at OSU Wexner Medical Center, and others elaborated.

“We’re in crisis. Hospitals across the state are running out of beds,” she said. “Our nurses, physicians, respiratory therapists and other staffers are burned out and stretched thin as hospitals try to increase their number of beds as the virus just spreads rampantly throughout the community. Right now our hospitals are being stressed to the extreme, and we haven’t even seen the fallout from the infections that occurred over Thanksgiving. … People who were exposed last week are being diagnosed this week and will need the hospital in the next one to two weeks. We will be overwhelmed by this increase in patients.”

Locally, 70 employees at Wheeling Hospital, which many Belmont County residents use, are in quarantine. The East Ohio Regional Hospital in Martins Ferry is expected to reopen in 90 days under new management.

Sproul said locally, Belmont County has begun to see new cases from the holiday.

“We have had some, but we are still in the timeline for more,” he said.

Colburn and DeWine advised the public to stay at home except for essential tasks, to wear a mask whenever going out, and to maintain social distance.

DeWine also mentioned personal friends who have died after being infected with the virus.

He added he has been in contact with the Ohio National Guard and Department of Health as they prepare to ship out vaccines to health care providers. More information about the distribution of the vaccine and its priorities are expected at DeWine’s talk on Friday. He mentioned nursing homes as another priority.

DeWine said Ohio is now at 15-percent positive for COVID-19. Belmont County remains at Level 3, or red, in the state’s color-coded system, and more five counties have gone to Level 4, or purple, bringing the total to eight: Medina, Portage, Richland, Stark and Summit counties have joined Lake, Lorain and Montgomery counties.

Formerly purple Franklin County is back to red, but still at a high rate, if not a sustained increase of cases.

“This does not mean by any means that Franklin County is out of the woods,” Andy Thomas, chief clinical officer at OSU Wexner Medical Center, said. “We’re just now, today, tomorrow, the weekend, are going to start seeing the impact of that spread.”

However, DeWine said the map has become less important during the current surge.

“Five months ago when we developed this system, it was intended to serve as an early warning system to let Ohioans know when to take increased precautions at the county level,” he said, adding it is of less value during a surge of new infections.

He said hospital use and the concentration of infected people per county is more important now. At coronavirus.ohio.gov, the public can find a chart of confirmed coronavirus cases in the last 14 days broken down by zip code.