News

New Covid Cases Remain Low in Arlington

The net count of coronavirus cases in Arlington has barely budged over the past 2 to 3 weeks.

On May 22, the Virginia Dept. of Health reported a cumulative total of 15,289 cases in Arlington over the course of the pandemic. Today, June 9, that number is 15,290, after five cases were removed overnight.

The removal of cases is due to suspected cases that later test negative being subtracted from the total, a county spokeswoman previously told ARLnow. Excluding the removed cases, Arlington County has seen just a couple of new cases per day over the past few weeks.

The current test positivity rate in the county is just 0.6%, according to VDH.

Covid-related hospitalizations, meanwhile, are low but still happening. Two have been reported over the past week, for a pandemic total of 854. One new death was reported on Monday, the first nearly three weeks, bringing Arlington’s total of reported Covid fatalities to 257.

In terms of vaccinations, the average daily vaccination rate in the county has hovered around 1,000 doses over the past week or so. Roughly 55% of eligible Arlington residents — those age 12 and over — are now fully vaccinated. About two-thirds of eligible residents have received at least one dose.

More than 240,000 doses total have been administered in the county, a number that excludes anyone vaccinated directly by a federal government agency, like the Dept. of Defense.

With the vaccination rate high and the case rate low, ARLnow has decided to discontinue our daily, independent recording of local Covid data, which we started in March 2020.

Each day we’ve put the latest Covid stats reported by the state — including, as of January, vaccinations — in an Excel spreadsheet. That has allowed us to create certain charts and perform some analyses not available to someone relying on VDH’s cumulative datasets.

We reported on the latest data on a daily basis during the peak of the pandemic, and have done so on a weekly basis more recently. Given the low infection rate, however, we will be stopping our independent data collection and regular reporting after today. Instead, we’ll report periodically on the latest numbers in the context of other local Covid-related news, utilizing VDH datasets and charts. Should the numbers rise significantly later this year, for whatever reason, we may resume more frequent reporting.