CHARLESTON, WV (WOWK) — The situation at Pikeville Medical Center is not looking good.

To put it in perspective, while CAMC currently has 20 hospital beds being uses by COVID-19 patients, a figure hospital spokespeople say remained steady this week, Pikeville Medical has 42 COVID-19 cases in their hospital beds, of which 19 are in the ICU.

Many of us by now have heard about the deadly Delta variant and how it accounts for most of the current new cases in the United States.

But on Thursday, Pike County health officials felt Kentuckians needed to hear this again, holding the first COVID-19 update in a long time as their cases, and hospitalizations, continue to rise.

Pike County Judge-Executive Ray Jones says there continues to be too much misinformation about vaccines out there, especially on social media.

“A Facebook friend posted that they got the vaccine and got a magnet that was stuck to their arm, some of you know my wife is a board-certified family physician, she had a patient ask her if there’s a microchip in the vaccine,” said Jones.

Currently, the county is only 44.45% fully vaccinated, not nearly where health officials want them to be, especially as most of their new hospitalizations are among the younger, and unvaccinated.

“On slide three you can see a graph of the weekly cases and you can see that bell curve, how we’ve rolled like a roller coaster over these past few months, and you can see here we go again, and the chart is just showing us go straight up again,” said Tammy Riley, Pike County Health Department’s Executive Director.

“No one under the age of 50 was vaccinated; this is upsetting it’s concerning,” said Riley.COVID-19 cases in children are also rising nationwide, with more than 71,000 reported last week, an 86% jump from the week before according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.