by James A. Bacon
The biggest news in the wonky world of Virginia COVID-19 statistics yesterday wasn’t some new wrinkle in the trend lines — take a look at the chart above and you’ll see that COVID-19 usage of hospital resources continues on a stable-to-declining path — it was the Virginia Department of Health (VDH) announcement that it was making a big change to how it compiles the number of tests it reports daily.
In the past, we learned yesterday, VDH counted the total number of people tested rather than the total number of tests administered. Therefore, if an individual was tested three or four times, he or she was counted only once. The switch accounts for the dramatic one-day surge in tests reported yesterday — more than 14,800, or almost three times the previous high number.
Now VDH displays on its dashboard both the total number of individuals tested and the total number of tests. Thus, 101,344 individuals have been tested (or, more accurately, have had their test results reported to the VDH), while 112,450 tests have been reported.
Some may be tempted to ridicule VDH for making this change. But I’m inclined to be charitable. It shows that VDH may be slow to adapt, but at least it’s not totally asleep at the switch. Nobody’s been through this drill before. There’s no settled format for presenting COVID-19 data, and VDH officials have had to figure it out as they go along. What’s important is that VDH thinking about how to present the data in a way that informs Governor Ralph Northam and state public health officials as they make critical decisions on how long to maintain COVID-19 lockdown measures.
This particular data set is critical because the Governor has said he won’t begin rolling back lockdown measures until the state develops the capacity to run at least 10,000 tests per day and also experiences a two-week decline in the percentage of tests that test positive for the virus, among other metrics. If those are his criteria, it’s important to know whether we’re talking about 10,000 new individuals tested or 10,000 total tests of any kind.
In the administration’s weekly Friday press conference, VDH chief Norman Oliver explained that the new methodology will enable the state to better calculate the percentage of tests that come back positive. Presumably, a declining percentage suggests that the spread of the virus is decelerating.
