District of Columbia

I'm curious as to why the dataset separated symptomatic and asymptomatic cases. Are either of these categorizations considered probable?

No, they are all laboratory-confirmed, we are just indicating how many of the confirmed cases are symptomatic.

Do you perform any de-duplication to reach the “Total Overall Tested”? If so, how? (i.e. instances swabbed, day, week, or recording only one positive test per person, but multiple negative tests for the same person)?

Yes. DC Health de-duplicates by sample collection date such that an individual who tests more than once on a given day with the same test result is only counted once. If a positive and negative test result exists for the same person on the same day, both tests are counted in the total test count since there is clear evidence of two separate tests performed for that individual. For the purpose of estimating the positivity rate, if there is both a positive and negative test for the individual on a given day, only the positive test is retained. For enumerating the total number of DC residents tested, we count each individual only once.

If the same person gets different test results on different days, would you report the raw results as part of the daily positives or do you apply any kind of logic such as reporting only the first negative or positive result per individual?

To enumerate the total case count, we only report the first positive result per individual. To enumerate the total number tests to DC residents, DC Health de-duplicates by sample collection date and test result such that an individual who tests more than once on a given day with the same test result is only counted once. If there is a positive and negative test result for the same person on the same day, these two tests are counted since there is evidence that these were two separate tests performed for that individual.

Will DC release a count of test encounters?

No plans at this moment

Is there information about active outbreaks in facilities available?

That data is not currently publicly available.

We are currently interpreting “Total Overall Tested” as referring to the total number of individuals tested. Is this correct? If so, do you have plans to release the total number of tests conducted?

The “total overall tested” on the website is actually the total number of tests conducted. The next metric on the website is the total number of DC Residents tested, which refers to individuals.

Will DC begin reporting the same categories for cases and deaths?

At this time, there are no plans to change how we report our data.