August 18, 2020

Question

Do you perform any deduplication to reach the “total tests” and/or “number of people tested” numbers? 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)? If the same person gets different tests 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?

August 18, 2020

Question

Other states provide their COVID-19 testing and outcomes in machine readable format (i.e. csv or json), but as far as we are aware, the Northern Mariana Islands do not at this time. Do you have plans to release this data in a machine readable format (i.e. csv or json)? We only have a record of “total tests” beginning from May 6th and “number of people tested” from July 9th. Do you have plans to release a full historical time-series for these metrics?

August 18, 2020

Question

We’re interested in testing data in units of “testing encounters,” which can be defined as “the number of people who have been tested per day.” Under this metric, if a person is being tested once today and once again the following week, that counts as two tests, however, if the same person has two samples collected at a testing center visit, then that only counts as one testing encounter. Might the Northern Mariana Islands be willing to release testing encounters, ideally including historical data and in a machine readable format?

August 18, 2020

Question

We are currently interpreting “total tests” as referring to the total number of tests conducted, and we are interpreting "number of people tested" as referring to the total number of individuals tested. Are these interpretations correct?