VI CONSORTIUM
ST. CROIX — A sixth person has died of the coronavirus in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The latest victim, who died on Tuesday, was the son of a husband and wife couple who died of the virus weeks apart, the wife on Monday, April 27, and the husband, the fifth Covid-19 death, on Saturday, May 9.
The son was on a ventilator at the Juan F. Luis Hospital before passing. The death was confirmed by the V.I. Department of Health.
The sixth death comes a week after Governor Albert Bryan’s “Safer at Home” plan, which took effect May 4th and allows non-essential businesses to re-open. The move increases the risk of community spread of the contagion, but the plan calls for mandatory face masks when entering business establishments. To that end, Mr. Bryan has said that people are safer now than they were before the plan, pointing to the mandatory wearing of masks — which residents, for the most part, have been complying with — and the closed geography of the territory, which does not include interstate travel, transit systems and large buses. Byran said and I quote:
“We don’t have a mass transit system, we don’t have a large bus system, we don’t have interstate [travel], so our factorization is a lot different. For the most part we still have a choked off tourism aspect because we don’t have that many people coming into the territory because they can’t go to a hotel.”
According to the latest USVI Dept. of Health data, 1,242 coronavirus tests have been performed, 69 of which have returned positive and 1115 negative. Additionally, 61 individuals have recovered, 58 cases were pending and six people have died.