CHARLESTON — West Virginia continues to get COVID-19 vaccines out the door as part of its distribution plan, while the state is seeing more cases and deaths but fewer tests with Christmas around the corner.

Gov. Jim Justice, speaking Wednesday during his final COVID-19 briefing before the Christmas weekend, encouraged families to re-consider large gatherings if possible. For those who continue to gather, Justice asked those families to be careful.

“Listen to me, you’ve got to be super careful with your family right now,” Justice said. “As sad and terrible as it may be, you may not really want to bring your family together. If you do, you really need to have masks on everybody, and they need to not be there for very long.”

According to the Department of Health and Human Resources, 1,119 new COVID-19 cases were received in a 24-hour period since Tuesday. There are 22,826 active COVID-19 cases in West Virginia — a 4.6-percent increase from 21,832 active cases seven days ago.

The state’s daily percent of positivity was 11.51 percent, which is the highest percentage since 12.15 percent on April 14. The cumulative percent of positivity climbed to 4.46 percent.

The vast majority of the state – 50 counties – is red, orange, and gold on DHHR’s County Alert System map for high infection rates and percent of positivity numbers. Only Randolph County is listed in the green for its percent of positivity, though its infection rate was in the red with 40.33 cases per 100,000 people based on a seven-day rolling average of cases.

After breaking records for daily lab test numbers earlier in December, West Virginia is now seeing lower daily test numbers along with more of those tests coming back positive for the coronavirus. State officials have attributed the decrease in testing to colder temperatures and the holiday season.

Justice said while free drive-thru testing will continue, the focus is changing to encouraging people age 60 or more to get tested for COVID-19 as soon as they so much get a sniffle in order to detect the virus and get them on antibody treatments as soon as possible. The goal is to catch people before they get seriously ill and take up a hospital bed. A secondary goal is finding a way to test college students weekly to find asymptomatic spreaders of the virus in order to quarantine them before spreading the virus to others.

“Continue to get tested,” Justice said. “It just continues to help in every way. One of the things we’re working on like crazy is we want to find a way to aggressively test. We want to do it every week if there is any way to afford it and it can be done to be able to test all of the kids at all of our colleges and universities. Those kids between the ages of 18 and 35 … are carrying this thing around and don’t even have a clue they even have it.”

After peaking at 21,585 tests on Dec. 4, tests on Tuesday totaled 5,978. Positive cases reported to DHHR on Tuesday totaled 688. The state averaged 939 new cases per day over the last seven days, while averaging 10,226 tests per day.

West Virginia keeps breaking new records for COVID-19 deaths, with the state reporting 42 deaths Tuesday. DHHR reported 23 deaths as of Wednesday with the state averaging 22 deaths per day over the last seven days. Since March, the state has lost 1,194 residents to COVID-19, with 155 residents lost over the last seven days.

Despite the bad news of increased COVID-19 cases and deaths, members of the West Virginia National Guard and state and local health officials continue to push out the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. Of the 60,875 vaccine doses the state had on hand Monday, 18,488 doses have been administered – more than 30 percent. The state received 44,300 new doses between a second week of Pfizer vaccine deliveries and the newly approved Moderna vaccine.

According to Justice, vaccine doses have been delivered to 100 percent of health departments, long-term care facilities, and nearly all of the state’s acute care hospitals. The vaccine should be completely administered to residents and staff of the state’s 214 long-term care facilities by the end of this week – well ahead of when most starts are starting distribution to long-term care facilities. According to Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker, West Virginia is one of four states leading the way on get their residents vaccinated.

Justice said the goal in the state’s vaccination phases is age, age, and age. Maj. Gen. James Hoyer, adjutant general of the West Virginia National Guard and a leader of the West Virginia Joint Interagency Task Force for Vaccinations, said as they push vaccine doses out to the sub-categories of phase I, the focus is on vaccination essential workers age 50 and older, broken down to ages 50-60, 60-70, and 70-80

“We try to work through each of those groups,” Hoyer said. “To get to the Governor’s objective of reducing the loss of life and reducing hospitalizations, we’re focusing on those age categories within those various phases first.”

According to Hoyer, 77.5 percent of the state’s COVID-19 deaths are residents over the age of 70, with resident in that age range accounting for a higher rate of hospitalizations for COVID-19.