COVID-19 Outbreak (Update: More than 2.9M cases and 132,313 deaths in US)

Saint_Ward said
No. I think they just want less than 10% of people coming for testing to be positive. At least, that's what made sense to me when they were only testing symptomatic people.

If suddenly you see a spike in positive results as a percentage of the total with respiratory issues, then you have an issue.

It's a confusing benchmark. I guess that they want to have 90% negatives to ensure that you getting a significant majority of positives. But at least in my region, we use to ONLY test patients with symptoms, and more recently have branched out to testing patients with exposure. So naturally, the percent positive rate will be lower. I'm just not sure that its incredibly valuable information, because that information can be deduced from the other stats. What I feel would be much more valuable is to have a goal for ED visitations. There should be a way to calculate the number of ED beds, providers, etc...and use that as a MAX capacity...then you can get the number of COVID related ED visits and be able to see "percentage of COVID cases per average capacity". It wouldn't be a perfect stat (because people do go to the ED for reasons other than COVID...the majority actually do)...but it would probably the most use single data point on the website.