While Hamilton County continues to report its lowest COVID-19 new case totals and hospitalizations in months, fewer people are being tested for the virus, which could hinder local understanding of the pandemic, especially as the spread of coronavirus variants appears almost certain.
As of Friday, the county was running a seven-day average of about 700 new COVID-19 tests a day. This is down from around 1,900 new tests a day in December and 1,400 new tests a day at the beginning of January. The current level of daily testing is the lowest it has been since the county began reporting daily testing numbers in July.
Aditya Khanna, assistant professor of behavioral and social sciences at Brown University, said decreasing levels of testing should be concerning given the threat of coronavirus variants, which appear to be more transmissible than the current version in the United States. On Thursday, Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger confirmed a variant of SARS-CoV-2 was circulating in the county.
The presence of variants, which may cause some mild reinfections for people who have already gotten sick, means people are potentially still at risk for the virus even when case counts appear to be dropping. Scientists are still studying the effects of the variants, but existing vaccines appear to stop the most serious cases of infection from the new variants.
There is a kind of cyclical relationship between testing and case counts, Khanna said. When case counts are high and there is attention to the spread of the virus, people may be more likely to think they could get infected or think their symptoms could be COVID-19.