Superior Court building on St. Croix Photo Credit: OFFICE OF DISASTER RECOVERY
The Superior Court in the District of St. Croix had to shutdown in-person service Wednesday after at least four employees tested positive for Covid-19, sources with knowledge of the shutdown told the Consortium.
The court had just resumed in-person services on Monday after utilizing an all-digital strategy for most of the pandemic, said a person familiar with the matter.
Covid-19 cases in the territory are on the rise. The V.I. Department of Health, which reported 35 new cases on Wednesday night for a total of 166 active cases, blamed the surge in infections on Thanksgiving gatherings, which the department said went against its own recommendations, along with that of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Governor Albert Bryan, speaking during his administration's Covid-19 response update Monday, discouraged gatherings and non-essential travel. He said Government House had canceled events already planned in an effort to minimize the spread of the virus.
"There is no mandate to cancel events as yet, but as Government House, we had a number of events scheduled for Christmas, including drive-thrus, we're going to go ahead and cancel our events. We just don't want anybody to have any reason to gather for any reason," he said.
Mr. Bryan said the Government House drive-thru would have seen the distribution of "goodies" while people simply drove through to collect them. "We're going to cancel all of that because we expect to see the numbers increase throughout the week and hopefully by Christmas we start to get a drop in these numbers. But for the foreseeable future, I think that things are going to be progressing in an upward way in terms of the coronavirus," the governor said.
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