Covid cases down but positivity rate up in Arlington

Arlington has seen a dip in its average daily Covid case counts, but the county’s test positivity rate has continued to rise.

As of this morning the seven-day moving average reached 154 daily cases, down from 200 cases per day in late May. But the test positivity rate ticked up to 16.2%, the highest point since January, according to Virginia Dept. of Health data.

The dichotomy is not unique to Arlington — Virginia as a whole is also seeing falling daily case counts but rising test positivity rates, per VDH data.

Hospitalization rates, meanwhile, appear to be falling. The current Covid hospitalization rate in Arlington is 6 weekly admissions per 100,000 residents, according to Centers for Disease Control data. That’s down from 7.7 weekly admissions per 100,000 last week.

Mike Silverman, emergency department chair at Virginia Hospital Center — now known as VHC Health — said in his weekly public Facebook post that patient volumes at the ER are up, but not necessarily due to Covid. He noted that the hospital is also seeing high Covid test positivity rates.

An excerpt from Silverman’s post is below.

Our May numbers finished 24% above our volume last May… Typically, we’ll have a month of super high volumes in the winter, whereas summer volumes tend to be a touch below average. It’s unclear to many of us why volumes are so high. While COVID account for some of the bump, it’s actually only a fraction of the overall volume increase. In theory, there’s not bent up demand for emergency care like there might be for colonoscopies and mammograms, yet across the country, ER volumes are soaring. May was actually our busiest month ever.

Our percent positivity and COVID numbers continue to increase in the ER. We’re at 6 week highs for percent positivity and case numbers for our symptomatic, asymptomatic, and total cases. These are not winter-like Omicron level surge numbers but there’s plenty of COVID around. In fact, the community testing rates are higher than the hospital testing rates.

Whereas last summer felt like a return to normal, it seems like most people are just living their normal lives now. However, Hopkins data shows that the country’s seven-day average of COVID cases is six times higher than it was last year.