Tweet points out a line graph plotting cases bears an uncanny resemblance to Virginia.

Like clouds and ink blots, if you stare at data too long, you could start to see things.

Thomas Berry was checking the news for the latest on the pandemic when he made an observation: A line graph plotting coronavirus cases in Virginia bore an uncanny resemblance to the state itself.

It wasn’t Jerry Seinfeld-level material (What is the deal with graphs?) but a sufficiently amusing discovery to share with his 900 Twitter followers.

The tweet went viral Tuesday, in large part because Gov. Ralph Northam retweeted it, tacking on his own joke.

“This may be the only time I want the Eastern Shore left off a Virginia map,” he said.

There it was — a trill of data, tracking the surges of infections statewide over the past year. It looked like the northern Virginia border. The axis was the straight line parting the commonwealth from North Carolina. Everything appeared to be there, from Charlottesville to Hampton Roads.

That is, except the counties of the Eastern Shore.

Had they been represented on the graph, that would have meant a severe and recent spike in COVID19. Across the state, there have been some 477,000 confirmed cases, but since late January, numbers have declined, from 17% of standard nasal swab tests coming back positive for the virus to about 5.5%.

Northam’s comment sparked a mixture of social media reactions, from LOL emojis to moral outrage.

But there is some context for his remark. The Democratic governor has a history of correcting maps that leave off his native Eastern Shore.

Three years ago, he presented an Onley McDonald’s with a map that included the 70-mile sliver of land after learning the restaurant left it off, according to a 2018 Delmarva Now story.

As lieutenant governor in 2015, he noticed an incomplete map of Virginia outside the State Veterinarian’s office in Richmond. After pointing it out, that map was corrected, too.

Because Accomack and Northampton counties are separated from the mainland by the Chesapeake Bay, they’ve frequently been forgotten in Virginia depictions or reassigned to Maryland. In 2016, presidential candidate Ted Cruz told people on Facebook to “Show your Virginia pride” with a state sticker that excluded the Eastern Shore.

“Wherever I go in the Commonwealth, if there is a map, and they don’t have the Eastern Shore, I let them know,” Northam told Delmarva Now.

For Berry, a Constitutional law scholar at the Cato Institute based in Washington, getting the retweet was thrilling. But his handful of new followers might find his feed wanting.

He’s neither an epidemiologist who can pontificate on the public health crisis nor a cartographer.

“I don’t have a steady output of map-related humor,” he said.