The town remains in the high risk category for second straight week.
SOUTHWICK- The Board of Health reported 13 new COVID-19 cases this week to bring Southwick’s pandemic total to 576 cases.
This week’s case count keeps Southwick in the high-risk community category for the second week in a row. The percent-positivity rate for the past 14 days is 5.09 percent and the average daily incidence rate per 100,000 residents is 24.8.
This week also marks the first time in nearly one month that Southwick’s percent positivity rate was higher than that of Hampden County as a whole. The Hampden County rate is 4.57 percent.
Because of Southwick’s status as a high-risk community, the Fall 2 sports season was suspended indefinitely last week, with just a week left to play.
Neighboring Westfield had not updated their weekly COVID-19 report as of April 23. Westfield typically updates their weekly COVID-19 numbers every Wednesday evening.
While Southwick remains a high-risk community for COVID-19, daily case counts in Massachusetts as a whole are falling after the spike in cases at the end of March.
On April 21 the seven-day average for daily COVID-19 cases in the state was 1,043.4, down by more than half from a recent peak of 2,598 on March 29.
In Massachusetts and across the country, all persons above the age of 16 became eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine on April 19. As of April 22, 5,397,052 vaccine doses had been administered. 3,216,855 people have received at least one dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, with 1,976,054 receiving both doses.
Administration of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine has slowed to a crawl after the FDA and CDC asked for a pause of its use last week. At least six women across the country were found to have developed serious blood clots in the weeks after they got the J&J shot. Though Massachusetts complied with the pause, between 100 and 200 people have received the shot each day since April 16.
204,143 Massachusetts residents have received the J&J shot as of April 22.
