So here's a COVID-19 statistic I did *not* know we didn't have: county-level testing positivity rates.

Why did I ask? Because Columbus (Franklin County) and Cleveland (Cuyahoga County) DO report their positivity rates. Other counties don't even have the numbers to figure it out.

Today @ColumbusHealth, @DrMRoberts & @FC_PublicHealth told me the positivity rate here is 13%.

That's astronomically high. That means about 1 of every 8 COVID-19 tests is coming back positive.

That means Franklin County's COVID-19 test positivity is SIGNIFICANTLY higher than:
- Nat'l average positivity rate - 8.2%
- Ohio statewide rate - 6.2%
- Cuyahoga County rate - 7.5%

I'm told by @OHdeptofhealth that Columbus/Franklin County and Cuyahoga County likely have agreements in place with testing labs to receive the numbers needed to calculate. Those are:

(POSITIVE TESTS ÷ TOTAL TESTS) x 100

The rest of the counties are only getting POSITIVE TESTS.

The only other Central Ohio county that could give me a semblance of a positivity rate today was Fairfield County. And that data is incomplete. See here:

The @LickingHealth spokesperson told me they expect to start receiving TOTAL TESTS — as well as POSITIVE TESTS — from @OHdeptofhealth by August 1st.

Today an ODH spokesperson said they're working towards getting that data out, but it's slow going & likely won't be historic data.

ODH is hamstrung by the fact that TOTAL TESTS or NEGATIVE TESTS are *not* required for release under health laws/orders — only the POSITIVE TESTS are.

@OHdeptofhealth receives total testing numbers from all statewide labs in one lump of data, not broken out county-by-county.

The Ohio Department of Health hopes to get the labs to break out the data, county-by-county, soon.

Until that happens, we can't compare positivity rates in each county — only total cases, which don't tell the whole story of COVID-19 infection rates in each community.