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Texas Governor Says Positive-Rate Surge Under Investigation

Texas Governor Says Positivity-Rate Surge Under Investigation

Texas officials have launched an investigation into why statewide Covid-19 data showed a record surge in positive-test rates even as hospital admissions and other metrics indicate the virus’s spread is slowing.

A special “data team” has been brought in to examine state health department analyses and calculations, Governor Greg Abbott said during a media briefing in Lubbock on Thursday. Just hours after the probe was announced, the department released 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 seeking testing, Abbott said.

Texas Governor Says Positive-Rate Surge Under Investigation

The positive-test rate jumped to a record 24.5% on Tuesday. Late Thursday, the health department posted on its website that the figure has plummeted to 16.08% as of Wednesday. No other explanation or details were provided.

“We have seen fewer people tested in the past few weeks,” Abbott said. July was characterized by several “surge-testing operations” conducted by public health officials to target developing hotspots, and which increased the total number of tests administered, he said.

Questions have swirled about how a backlog of unaudited tests may be skewing the calculations. The effect of the backlog, which swelled to more than 1 million tests at the end of July, may be to shrink the denominator, resulting in an artificially high positivity rate. State health department officials haven’t responded to repeated requests for comment.

Houston Conditions

Testing numbers will grow in the next week or so as a surge-testing operation kicks off 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 U.S. city, the virus’s spread already appears to be slowing. The rate of effective transmission was below 1 for a third straight day as of Wednesday and growth in new cases has fallen 22% from last week, according to the Texas Medical Center. A transmission rate below 1 indicates dissemination is declining.

In Houston and eight surrounding counties, 1,558 new cases were detected on Wednesday, down from almost 2,000 a day last week, the medical center said on its website. Meanwhile the positive-test rate was 10.2%, down by almost half from 20.3% last month.

Houston’s data has been closely watched by public health authorities and politicians because its hospital system was among the first to show signs of stress at the start of Sunbelt 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 personnel are far more scarce.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.