Reprinted from Deadline Hollywood by Tom Tapp on June 23, 2021.
For the first time since December 2020, California’s 7-day Covid test positivity rate is on the rise. The test positivity rate, which hit a pandemic-era low of 0.7% on June 5, has risen slowly but steadily over the past two-and-a-half weeks to 1.1% on Wednesday. It’s the first sustained rise in that key Covid-19 indicator since the worst of California’s pandemic in January — and its happening just as the state lifts most Covid-19 restrictions.
That same 7-day Covid test positivity rate has also risen over roughly the same period in the state’s most populous county, Los Angeles. L.A. bottomed out most recently in early June at just above 0.4%. On Wednesday, the county’s test positivity rate had grown to 0.8%. (See chart below — which does not include the last week of data.)
The test positivity rate is, as the name indicates, a measure of how prevalent new infections are. It is calculated as the number of positive tests divided by the total number of tests performed. Averaging the rate over a week’s time helps eliminate data hiccups, and because the stat is relative to the number of tests, it is not influenced by peaks and valleys in the raw numbers of tests administered. …
