Eastern Shore experiences spike in COVID test positives

The Eastern Shore experienced one of its worst COVID days Wednesday according to the Virginia Department of Health’s Dashboard on Thursday.

The Dashboard says that Accomack County had 97 test positives on Wednesday, the largest one day total in two years. Northampton reported its third 20+ day increase in the last week, neither of which was its one day record.

We asked Jon Richardson of the Eastern Shore Health District if there was a specific reason for the jump in cases and he replied that there could have been a number of reasons including reporting lags, weather or time of day processed that may have contributed. Richardson also said that the average number of daily cases on the Shore is about 60 per day over the last week. Richardson said that the dashboard is not under local control and he couldn’t speculate.

On the positive side out of the 120 reported test positives on Wednesday there was one hospitalization in each county and no deaths reported. So far locally, the hospitalizations attributed to the latest wave of COVID have been relatively low.