For public health and economic recovery, Alaska needs more COVID-19 testing
About 260 Alaskans are getting tested daily for COVID-19.
One way of looking at new national research findings from Harvard is that the daily testing level in Alaska should be closer to 1,100 per day a month from now if the state is to open everything up.
A complicating factor in making a sweeping conclusion, however, is that the percentage of positive tests found so far in Alaska is low, suggesting that the disease has yet to spread widely through the population, so there is uncertainty about the ideal testing target.
But an increase in the spread of the disease will happen as more infected people come in contact with others when restrictions are lifted, so more tests are essential no matter how you look at it.
Nationwide, the rate of COVID-19 testing needs to triple, according to a New York Times report based on the work of Harvard researchers.
About 150,000 people a day are being tested, but Harvard researchers say about 500,000 people should be tested daily nationwide.
“That level of testing is necessary to identify the majority of people who are infected and isolate them from people who are healthy, according to the researchers. About 20 percent of those tested so far were positive for the virus, a rate that the researchers say is too high,” the Times said.
“There is variation in the rate of testing and positive results among states, but most need to administer more tests to get to the level the researchers suggest — a minimum of about 152 tests per 100,000 people each day,” the Times reported.
In the last two weeks, Alaska has tested an average of about 260 people per day, according to the COVID-19 Tracking project. That is roughly 40 people per 100,000 population. Raising the rate to 152 people per 100,000 population would require about 1,100 tests per day. That would work out to testing about 1 percent of the state population every week.
But unlike a state like New Jersey, where nearly 50 percent of the COVID-19 tests have come back positive, only 3 percent of the Alaska tests have been positive. That is close to the rate in Korea. Other remote and largely rural states also have relatively low positive percentages on the test totals.
The states with high positive percentages likely have many more people infected who have not been tested, said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.
The actual number of tests reported in Alaska varies greatly by the day. In the last two weeks, the number has ranged from 30 on April 7 to 715 on April 17.
Close to 10,000 people in Alaska have been tested for the coronavirus, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
About 330 people in Alaska have tested positive, nine have died, three dozen are hospitalized and more than 150 people have recovered.
“The goal of the testing level recommended by the researchers would be to test nearly everyone who has mild or severe flulike symptoms, and an average of 10 contacts for each person who tests positive for the virus,” the Times said.
Jha said that by increasing the number of tests nationwide, it will be possible to gain some confidence about who is infected.
“You want to drive the positive rate down, because the fundamental element of keeping our economy open is making sure you’re identifying as many infected people as possible and isolating them,” he told the Times.
Jha said if you want to know if he guy in the next cubicle or the waiter serving you at a restaurant is infected, the only way is to increase testing.
Asked on Fox News, why we need “so many tests,” Jha said that testing 3.5 million people a week, about 1 percent of the population, would not be that many tests.
He said that because of basic biology, it’s “not a risk, it’s a certainty” that as soon as people go back to work, infected people will come in contact with those who are not infected and the disease will spread.
The thing to do is to test large numbers of people, which will allow those who are infected to shelter in place, while others go about their daily lives, he said.
This New York Times graphic shows the current daily level of testing for COVID-19 in Alaska per 100,000 residents. The dotted line shows the increase needed to get from testing 31 people per 100,000 to 152 people per 100,000 residents.