The Vermont Health Department is awaiting the results of hundreds of tests to determine the size of a potential outbreak of the coronavirus in the Manchester and Londonderry area.
On Thursday, Vermont Health Commissioner Dr. Mark Levine said of the seven follow-up tests completed on just under 60 people who had tested positive using a less reliable, but faster testing method, two came back positive.
Contact tracers are still trying to learn the source of any possible infection.
“So far we have interviewed over three-quarters of those presumed positives,” Levine said during a Thursday afternoon online news conference. “We don’t have enough information yet to connect all the possible cases or to call this an outbreak.”
He said the results of the initial tests and hundreds more that have been done at testing sites set up in Manchester and Londonderry Wednesday and Thursday would be coming back overnight Thursday and into Friday.
He said he expected more information would become available by Friday’s regular virus briefing.
“This is not a false alarm,” he said. “There are going to be cases in this geographic part of the state.”
The health department does not consider the faster, but less reliable test results to be positive until they have been confirmed by a more reliable method.
But all the potentially positive cases are being treated as though they are confirmed positives. People are being told to stay home.
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INMATE POSITIVE
The Vermont Department of Corrections says an inmate tested positive for the virus at the Northeast Correctional Complex in St. Johnsbury. The inmate has shown no symptoms of COVID-19.
The positive case was the only one detected after testing 215 inmates and staff was conducted at the prison on Monday.
The inmate was moved to isolation and contact tracing begun.
The inmate had been at the prison since June 16. He had been quarantined and a June 27 test was negative.
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NUMBERS
On Thursday, the health department reported nine new positive cases of the virus across the state, bringing the total since the pandemic began to more than 1,320. The figure did not include the positives from the Manchester and Londonderry area of southern Vermont in the figure
The number of deaths in Vermont remains steady at 56, a figure which has not changed since mid-June.
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