Texas officials have begun an investigation into why statewide Covid-19 data show a record decline in rates with positive tests, even as hospital admissions and other metrics indicate that the spread of the virus is slower.
A special ‘data team’ has been deployed to investigate the state health department analyzes and calculations, Governor Greg Abbott said during a media briefing in Lubbock on Thursday. Just hours after the probe was announced, the department published a new rate that was drastically lower than any figures posted in more than a week.
One factor in the jump in the positivity rate may be that fewer Texans are taking tests, Abbott said.
Photographer: Alex Wong / Getty Images
The rate for positive tests jumped to a record 24.5% on Tuesday. Last Thursday, the health department posted on its website that the figure has fallen to 16.08% since Wednesday. No other statement or details were provided.
“We’ve seen fewer people test in the past few weeks,” Abbott said. July was characterized by several “surge testing operations” conducted by public health officials to develop hotspots, which increased the total number of tests conducted, he said.
Questions have swirled about how a backlog of uncontrolled tests can skew the calculations. The effect of the backlog, which swelled to more than 1 million tests at the end of July, could be to shrink the denominator, resulting in an artificially high positivity rate. State health department officials have not responded to repeated requests for comment.
Conditions of Houston
Test numbers will grow next week as a surge-testing operation begins in the Houston area that will aim to test an additional 50,000 people over a 10-day period, the governor said.
In Houston, the fourth largest American city, the spread of the virus appears to be slowing down. The rate of effective transfer was below 1 for a third straight day on Wednesday and growth in new cases fell 22% from last week, according to the Texas Medical Center. A throughput rate below 1 indicates that distribution is returning.
In Houston and eight surrounding counties, 1,558 new cases were discovered on Wednesday, down from nearly 2,000 a day last week, the medical center said on its website. Meanwhile, the positive test rate was 10.2%, with almost half reduced from 20.3% last month.
Houston data has been closely watched by public health authorities and politicians because its hospital system was one of the first to show signs of stress at the start of Sunbelt’s outbreak. The worst of the crisis has now shifted to border and coastal communities like Corpus Christi and the Rio Grande Valley, where medical infrastructure and staff are much less.
(Updates with latest positive test rate in second, fourth paragraph.)
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