The Alexandria City Council voted unanimously in favor of a resolution that extends the city’s COVID-19 state of emergency until Jan. 31, 2022.

The council has been extending the declaration every six months since it originally passed on March 9, 2020. The amended resolution states that “the emergency continues to exist and will exist into the future.”

Emergency declarations give local governments broad powers to quickly manage and direct resources to respond to major disasters. On the state level, Virginia and Maryland allowed their states of emergency to lapse on July 1. In D.C., the public health emergency ended on July 25, but the broader state of emergency won’t conclude until Oct. 8. Other area localities have also maintained their local states of emergency, including neighboring Arlington County and Montgomery County.

Much like in the rest of the region, COVID-19 case counts are spiking in Alexandria due to the delta variant. The seven-day rolling average of new cases per day is now at 22.5 and trending steadily upward. The last time the metric reached that rate was in mid-February, before vaccines were widely available to the general public.

However, hospitalizations and deaths in the city have remained low. Since May, the city has fluctuated between having zero and two people hospitalized with COVID-19, and that hasn’t changed even with the surge in cases. About nine Alexandrians have died of the coronavirus since early May.

According to numbers from the Virginia Department of Health, about 64.8% of the city’s total population has received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine, with 56.4% considered fully vaccinated. However, those metrics do not account for Alexandria residents who may have gotten their vaccines from federal government sources, which are not reported to the Virginia database tracking vaccinations.

Alexandria’s health department is now gearing up to extend its vaccination efforts into the fall and winter, to reach more people who haven’t received shots and to get boosters to immunocompromised people.

This story was updated to reflect the City Council’s vote to extend the state of emergency.