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As of today we will be moving away from reporting percent positive on our COVID-19 data hub. At prior points in the pandemic, when the State was overseeing the vast majority of testing in Rhode Island, percent positive was a very meaningful metric. However, as part of Rhode Island’s shift toward an endemic response to COVID-19, much more testing is happening in traditional healthcare settings, and at-home tests have become the option of choice for many Rhode Islanders. Because these tests do not all get reported to the State, our percent positive data is now much harder to interpret. Additionally, several weeks ago we made a shift to focus our State testing sites on symptomatic people. This makes it very hard to compare percent positive data now to percent positive at prior points in the pandemic, when many asymptomatic people were doing routine testing at State sites.
Joseph Wendelken | Public Information Officer
Rhode Island Department of Health
3 Capitol Hill, Room 401; Providence, Rhode Island 02908
