COURT HOUSE – Covid Act Now raised its designation of New Jersey to ‘very high risk’ for contracting the disease. It lists the same ‘very high risk’ designation for 15 of New Jersey’s 21 counties, including Cape May County.
The independent nonprofit uses a multidisciplinary team to aggregate state and county Covid health metrics and model the data against a set of thresholds of risk. The tracking site’s data have been frequently used and reported in Cape May County’s weekly Covid reports.
The culprit in the designation is the rising average number of daily new cases over the last two weeks. The seven-day average of new cases in the county has more than doubled since the start of November.
The positivity rate reported for the county has also increased by 6.1%. That represents the percentage of test samples in a given time period that show a positive result for the disease. The rate of transmission has also increased in both the state and county.
These increases in the metrics are occurring over much of the Northeast and Midwest, as colder weather forces more interpersonal interactions indoors.
