Online Tool enables Eastern Shore Residents to take a closer look at tick borne disease threats

A new online tool is giving Accomack County residents a closer look at their local risk of encountering ticks during the height of summer.

TickZone, a free website that updates daily, uses weather conditions, satellite land cover, and CDC Lyme disease data to estimate tick activity for individual towns across the country.

According to the site, Accomack County reports about 26 Lyme disease cases per 100,000 people each year. That’s the 36th-highest rate among Virginia’s 132 counties and above the CDC’s threshold for a high-incidence Lyme disease county.

The model estimates that Greenbackville currently has the highest tick exposure risk in Accomack County, with differences between towns largely determined by the amount of forest and the number of wooded edges where people are more likely to come into contact with ticks.

The website’s creator, Nathan Burnett, says the model is designed to estimate where people are most likely to encounter ticks—not to predict where Lyme disease infections will occur. The risk scores are updated every morning using current weather conditions, including temperature, humidity, and recent rainfall, along with seasonal activity patterns for deer ticks, lone star ticks, and American dog ticks.

Residents can search for their town’s current tick risk for free at TickZone’s website: https://tickzone.app/location/virginia/accomack-county