COVID-19 positive rate ‘hard to gauge’ in Lexington. But it’s high at some test sites
Lexington’s minority communities are getting infected with COVID-19 at a disproportionate rate, and the city’s efforts to test more heavily within those communities have resulted in a higher ratio of positive tests.
The overall positivity rate for Lexington’s Mobile Neighborhood Testing Program is 6.9 percent based on 5,297 tests administered, according to available data from the mayor’s office. But some rounds had higher rates. As of Friday morning, the state’s seven-day rolling average positive rate was 5.5 percent.
Lexington’s Black community makes up 21 percent of all COVID-19 cases despite only being about 14 percent of the population. The Hispanic community makes up 28 percent of the cases despite only being about 7 percent of the population.
The mobile testing program was started with the intention of getting more Black and Hispanic residents tested, according to news releases from the mayor’s office. Although the mobile site is temporarily stationed in one neighborhood, anyone from Fayette, or even other counties, can get tested there.
The last two mobile testing sites have driven the positivity rate upward. The positive rate hit 8.7 percent from July 23-25 when the testing program was in the Cardinal Valley neighborhood. It was 8.1 percent from July 30 to Aug. 1 at Consolidated Baptist Church on Russell Cave Road.
The Shiloh Baptist Church testing site ran 1,212 tests from July 16-18 and had a positivity rate of 7.2 percent. Shiloh Baptist Church on East Fifth Street was also the home of the mobile program the week before, administering 1,110 tests from July 9-11 with a 2.9 percent positivity rate.
In total, 5,297 tests were administered across all four test sites. There were 366 positives.
That data isn’t for the whole city, spokesman Craig Cammack said, because more tests were conducted at other public testing sites, private health care facilities and urgent care facilities. Totals for all facilities aren’t gathered, the city says.
“It’s very hard to gauge what our local positivity rate is,” Cammack said.
The data certainly differs from site to site, and by the testing time frame. The first two days of testing for University of Kentucky students yielded a positive rate of less than 1 percent from 2,742 tested. There were 23 new infections confirmed through the testing Monday and Tuesday, the latest numbers UK had released as of Friday night.
Cammack said the mayor’s office did not have the total number of positive tests recorded at the Bluegrass Community and Technical College testing site, but it administered 18,421 total tests in the 55 days it operated. The city also did not have positivity rate data for the first week — June 25-27 — of the mobile testing program.
The available testing data could include people who do not live in Fayette County.
Nonresidents getting tested in Fayette County is one of several reasons the Lexington-Fayette County Health Department doesn’t keep an official positivity rate, according to Dr. Kraig Humbaugh, Lexington’s commissioner of health. Other reasons include testing sites not being required to report the total number of tests they administer and local residents leaving the county to get tested.
“It’s really, really hard to figure this out at a county level unless we could get reports of all the tests that are done, and then we would have to assume that all the tests are done on Fayette County residents,” he said.
Despite those obstacles, the state’s positivity rate is still tracked, but that’s not a perfect science either. According to the state’s COVID-19 website, the Kentucky Department of Public Health calculates the positivity rate by only using data from the labs which report their total tests administered, so data from labs which don’t report tests conducted gets disregarded.
In addition, repeat tests can become part of the equation if people get tested multiple times.
The state health department said it did not have data to show a positivity rate for specific counties. The state’s positivity rate is instead calculated by aggregating numbers at a statewide level.
Humbaugh said the rate is easier to track at a state level because residents are less likely to leave their state to get tested than they are to leave their county.
“You don’t have to worry about borders quite as much,” he said.
This story was originally published August 7, 2020 at 11:11 AM.