August 23, 2020
Question
On VI's COVID-19 dashboard, there's a category for 'tested' – could you clarify what is meant by the term? Does it refer to the number of unique people tested or the number of specimens tested overall? If 'tested' refers to total individuals tested, do you have plans to release the total number of tests? If 'tested' refers to total specimens tested, do you have plans to release the number of total individuals tested?
August 23, 2020
Question
Do you have plans to release a full historical time-series of all testing and results? We have been capturing the total test results in Tested since 5/13/2020. Do you plan to release a historical time series of that number? Will this historical data set be available consistently and in an automation friendly form, like an ArcGIS or CKAN API or a direct download of CSV or JSON?
Other states and territories provide their COVID-19 testing and outcomes in machine readable format, but as far as we are aware US Virgin Islands Department of Health does not at this time. Do you have plans to release this data in a machine readable format, like an ArcGIS or CKAN API or a direct download of CSV or JSON?
August 23, 2020
Question
Do you perform any deduplication to reach the 'Tested' value? If so, how? (i.e. instances swabbed per day/week; recording only one positive test per person, but multiple negative tests for the same person; etc.)? When reporting testing results, if the same person gets different test results on different days, would you report 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? We’re also interested in testing data in units of “testing encounters”, which can be defined as “the number of unique 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 tested at a testing center visit, then that only counts as one testing encounter. Are you willing to or are you planning to release testing encounters?