Cases of Covid-19 confirmed by Martha’s Vineyard Hospital held steady at 15 on the Island Wednesday. Health officials from tiny Aquinnah separately reported that it had its first case.

It was not immediately clear whether the Aquinnah case was one of the 15.

In its daily testing update, the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital said that it had conducted 291 tests for the virus as of 11 a.m. Wednesday morning, with 15 of those tests coming back positive. There were 263 negative tests and 13 tests are pending results. No one is currently hospitalized on the Island with the coronavirus.

The Aquinnah case came to light at an Aquinnah selectmen’s meeting Wednesday morning, when board of health member Jim Glavin disclosed that town's first case.

“It’s an off-islander, someone who came here to hide out,” he said.

Mr. Glavin said the individual was quarantined in their home and doing fine. He told selectmen that he suspected most, if not all, of the cases on the Island had come from off-Island and that the virus was not actively spreading in the community.

At a meeting with contractors later in the day, the hospital’s chief executive officer, Denise Schepici, said she did not believe the Aquinnah case was included in the hospital’s numbers.

"It sounds like that person came with it,” Ms. Schepici told the MV Builders Association, meeting by videoconference. “That person didn’t get tested at our hospital so it’s not one of our fifteen.”

But in an email late Wednesday, Tisbury health agent Maura Valley, who is serving as a spokesman for the Island boards of health, said she believed the Aquinnah case was included in the 15, adding that she and the other health agents have felt there was no valuable information to be gained by reporting cases town by town

Daily updates from the boards of health have included age and gender breakdown of cases, but not town-by-town breakdowns. Although health agents reported the towns of the first two cases on-Island, they have since stopped, citing privacy concerns.

"We are a small community, one island, and we will continue to report as such.  The state will report individual town numbers when the positive cases in that town reach 5,” Ms. Valley said in the email.

Statewide, the department of public health reported 1,745 new positive cases on Wednesday, down from a high of more than 2,600 one week ago, but approximately 200 more than had been reported on Tuesday. The state also reported 221 new deaths from the virus.

Nearly 43,000 people have tested positive for Covid-19 in Massachusetts since the outbreak began out of the more than 180,000 who have been tested.

The state also provided a second weekly update that provided a town-by-town breakdown of the positive case numbers. The new state numbers show that West Tisbury has the most cases on-Island, with seven. There are fewer than five cases each in Oak Bluffs and Tisbury, and zero cases in Edgartown, Chilmark and Aquinnah.  Previously, the state had reported that Edgartown had fewer than five.

Hospital officials also announced that starting tomorrow, they would no longer send out daily update emails to the press. They said they would continue to update their website with testing information daily. 

Weekly press briefings, which have occurred each Tuesday and are hosted by hospital spokesman Katrina Delgadillo, CEO Denise Schepici and head of nursing Claire Seguin, would continue, officials said.