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Popular Farmville restaurants North Street Press Club and The Fishin’ Pig closed their doors temporarily recently due to potential COVID-19 exposure. The Fishin Pig has announced it will reopen Tuesday, Jan. 12.

A Facebook post by The Fishin’ Pig dated Thursday, Jan. 7, informed customers the restaurant would be closed until further notice due to COVID-19. That further notice came Monday, Jan. 11, when the restaurant announced on Facebook it would reopen Tuesday, Jan. 12. A sign on the door of the North Street Press Club says the restaurant will be closed until Monday, Jan. 18, due to possible COVID-19 exposure among staff.

The two businesses are operated by co-owners Nash Osborn and Matt Hurley.

On Friday, Osborn gave some insight behind the decision to temporarily close both businesses.

“We have had a few employees that were potentially exposed to a COVID-positive person,” he said. “So we made the decision out of precaution to shut down and allow those people time for self-quarantine and also to be tested, and also to disinfect and deep-clean the restaurants.”

Osborn added the two establishments had up to this point been able to operate since the start of the pandemic back in March of 2019, with nearly 100 employees, without a potential COVID-19 exposure.

“We’re pretty proud of the way we’ve done things thus far, and of course, for us to get this news from our employees, we wanted to make sure that we were protecting everybody; employees, guests and community.

“We are extremely grateful for the support we’ve received from all of you throughout the pandemic,” the owners stated via Facebook, “and look forward to resuming normal operations as soon as safely possible.”

The news comes as the area sees a large rise in COVID-19 numbers following the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.

On Friday, Kinsa HealthWeather, a website which visualizes a prediction model of case growth in communicable diseases for localities, rated Prince Edward County a 94 out of 100 in area risk of COVID-19 transmission, describing the county as in a state of critical risk in which cases are “very high and spreading rapidly.”

Locally, Buckingham County is also considered in critical risk at 91 out of 100 on the case growth scale. Cumberland County is considered at a high risk level of 68 out of 100.

To the North, Fairfax County was listed by Kinsa HealthWeather on Friday as being a 76 out of 100. Richmond City was listed as 84 out of 100. Dinwiddie, to the east, was listed as having a risk level of 78. Roanoke was at 71.