MADISON, Wis. — The state Department of Health Services has posted a new COVID-19 metric on its website Wednesday.
News 3 Now has used the percent of positive cases as a metric for the past few months, as seen in the chart below.
The chart consists of the percentage of people who test positive for the coronavirus compared to the percent of people who test negative. On Wednesday, that number reached 17.2%.
News 3 Now uses data from the chart on the DHS website as part of our coverage. Worth noting is that in the above chart, a person’s results are only measured once.
In this chart, that means any person who tests positive once and tests positive a second time will only be reported as one positive case. The same applies to those who test negative for the virus more than once.
A new chart from DHS was posted Wednesday, which includes every single test ever conducted.
For those who test positive more than once, each and every test will be recorded. As of Wednesday, the percent positive for that statistic sits at 9.4%.
The DHS page states the percent positive is lower on the new chart because there are many repeat tests included.
DHS also put the two lines of each chart side-by-side in a third chart.
Overall, the two lines follow the same trajectory but start to split apart around mid-June.
Health officials said the divergence was due to an improvement in the state’s testing capacity. As a result, the state has begun to see more repeat testing.
Channel 3000 will report both numbers in our coverage so readers can get a complete picture of daily testing results.
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