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By next week, most city facilities, including City Hall, will be open for in-person services.

Other than the Suffolk Workforce Development Center at 157 N. Main St., located in a privately owned building, all city facilities will open for in-person services beginning March 15.

Workforce Development Center services are still available to the public by calling 757-514-7730.

“While the situation surrounding COVID-19 continues to evolve and makes it difficult to set hard deadlines for returning all of our operations to normal,” said Interim City Manager Al Moor in a statement, “we have taken every precaution we reasonably can to ensure the safety of the public and our employees. We thank everyone for doing their part to help protect the health and safety of each other.”

The city still recommends people conduct business with the city online, saying it is the safest way to do so. It said there have been “facility modifications” to promote the safety of community members and staff, and enhanced sanitizing measures will continue.

Face masks will still be required in city buildings, along with maintaining a six-foot distance from others, per Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines.

Most city buildings closed nearly one year ago, on March 16, 2020, as COVID-19 began to spread in Virginia.

Residents will be encouraged to review the self-assessment COVID-19 symptom checklist when entering city facilities.

Suffolk’s 7-day moving average percent-positivity for COVID-19 is 7.62% — statewide it is 6% — and its cases per 100,000 residents are at 18.2 (statewide: 15.8 per 100,000). Both metrics have been trending down — the percent-positivity for 40 days and the cases per 100,000 residents for 58 days.

At the time city offices closed, the state had 51 cases and no deaths, and no cases had yet to be reported in the Western Tidewater Health District. As of this week, there have been 7,027 positive COVID-19 cases in the city and 168 deaths.