As Henrico testing increases, percentage of new infections decreases drastically
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During the first six weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, just about 3,000 Henrico residents were tested for the virus. But in a sign that local testing may now be more readily available, more than half that many people were tested in the past six days alone in the county.
There’s more good news: while about 28 percent of the former group tested positive for the virus, less than 8 percent of the latter group did.
The county witnessed just 139 new confirmed cases among the 1,765 people tested between April 29 and May 5, according to data released by the Virginia Department of Health and supplemented by the Henrico Health District.
A full picture of the county’s recent testing progress had not been available since late last week, when VDH made changes to the site on which it provides daily updates about statewide test results.
Although the site continued to display the number of confirmed cases, hospitalizations and deaths by locality, it no longer displayed the number of tests conducted within each of the state’s local health districts – making it impossible to determine whether the percentage of new cases in a particular district or jurisdiction was rising or falling day by day. (A number of health districts in the state include multiple localities, but Henrico’s includes only the county itself.)
On Friday, VDH spokeswoman Julie Grimes told the Citizen that officials were working to restore the data, but it has not yet returned.
Responding to an inquiry from the Citizen Tuesday, Henrico Health District spokesman George Jones provided Henrico’s total test count – 4,790.
“There’s a problem with the website,” Jones wrote in an email. “This data should be back online sometime this week.”
Overall, the county’s positive rate among those tested is 20.5 percent.
As of Tuesday, 106 deaths in Henrico had been attributed to the virus – with all but 15 of them occurring among residents of nursing homes or senior living facilities in the county, according to Henrico Chief of Staff Cari Tretina.
All of the county’s virus-related deaths have occurred in people 50 or older – 55 of them among people 80 or older and 30 among those in their seventies. Seventeen have occurred among those in their sixties, and four among those in their fifties.
