Poultry plant numbers will be distinguished by ES Health District in daily reporting

While there have been several reports of the results of the testing of Accomack County’s two poultry plants, many are still questioning when the numbers will be officially added to the Virginia Department of Health’s official daily report.

Jon Richardson with the Eastern Shore Health District, expounding on comments last week about having to manually input the data, said Friday morning the health department is able to input approximately 25 of the poultry plant results each day. As mentioned last week, Richardson is devoting the maximum amount of resources possible to tracing COVID-19 cases, which leaves little in the way of staff for data imputation.

Website updates Thursday, May 28 and Wednesday, May 27 reported 29 and 26 new cases on the Shore respectively.  Of those, 49 were poultry cases associated with the earlier mass testing and 6 were new cases. Before Tuesday, Accomack County had only seen two double digit increases in the last two weeks.

Richardson confirmed to ShoreDailyNews.com Friday afternoon there are fewer than 200 poultry plant tests to report in official state numbers. As reported last week, not all the positive tests from the plants will be reflected in Virginia’s numbers, as a number of their employees live in Maryland.

“It is important to us that the community be able to trust and better understand the numbers reported on the VDH website which are updated daily. As a result, we have figured out a method to manually differentiate between the older poultry cases still being entered by our staff and new cases,” said Richardson. “As was mentioned earlier this week, it is slower going than what we expected. ”

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