Hoboken appeared to be close to flatting the curve after reporting just 37 new COVID-19 patients in the past week, though the city is warning residents that a rise is likely for tomorrow due to backlogged cases.
By John Heinis/Hudson County View
“We learned today of a backlog in some confirmed positive cases, due to an increase in testing and phasing in the rapid, 15-minute tests. Some of the tests conducted by Riverside were provided to the NJ Department of Health, however an issue in the processing meant the City was not provided with those confirmed numbers,” Mayor Ravi Bhalla said in his daily coronavirus update.
“The updated results will be manually inputted by Riverside Medical and the Hoboken Health Department and reported tomorrow for the daily and weekly report. Although this backlog will skew the daily trends in our data when reported tomorrow, it should not be viewed as an actual, one day spike in numbers. Rather, the cases reported tomorrow represent positive tests that occurred over several days but were simply not reported to the City until now.”
He also cautioned that with more kits being delivered and tests being conducted, a rise in cases should still be expected.
Today, Hoboken reported 409 COVID-19 cases and 23 fatalities, with the latest passing being a man in his 80s.
The Riverside Medical Group began conducting 15-minute COVID-19 tests in the Mile Square City last week.
Based on data compiled by the New Jersey Department of Health, there are 12,645 confirmed COVID-19 patients in Hudson County and 606 deaths as of Thursday, the second and third most in the state by county, respectively.
