Are you positive that Covid-19 cases are on the upswing this Summer? With the lack of an accurate and reliable national Covid-19 surveillance system, it may be hard to tell what the heck is really happening with the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in the U.S. But there are several indications that yet another Covid-19 surge may potentially be happening, including one indicator from the Walgreens Covid-19 Index website. This website shows the percentage of Covid-19 tests performed at Walgreens locations each week that have turned out to be positive. And that’s been trending upwards since hovering around 20% in April 2023. This week it’s at 44.7%, which is up 3.4% from 41.3% the week prior. In fact, this is the highest positivity rate since Walgreens began posting such data in May 2021. That’s not a very positive finding, assuming that you don’t like getting sick and risking all the badness that comes with long Covid and other possible Covid-19 complications. Yeah, increasing positivity is not always a good thing, no matter what a life coach may tell you.
The percentage of tests performed that come back positive is a rough measure of how prevalent the virus may be in the community. That’s why in early 2021 Walgreens coordinated with lab testing company Aegis Sciences to develop a tool that tracks such test positivity rates from Walgreens 5,000 or so retail locations. Unless you are the virus, you want this test positivity rate number to be as low as possible. Looking at the graph of this measure on the Walgreen’s website shows that this number started off at 9.8% on May 7, 2021, and dropped to 3.1% the following month before coronavirus-ing up to 17.1% in mid-August corresponding to the the Summer 2021 Delta variant-fueled surge. This dropped back to 10.1% in late October 2021 as the Delta variant-fueled surge subsided.
But then came the Fall 2021 and Winter 2021-2022 Omicron-fueled surge with the test positivity rate peaking again in the latter half of January 2022, this time even higher surpassing 37%. It was Omicron OMG for a while until Covid-19 cases fell in February. This was matched by a march in test positivity rates down to a low of below 4% in mid-March 2022.
Since then, the test positivity curve has gone up and down along with the subsequent Summer 2022 and Winter 2022-2023 Covid -19 surges. This brings us to what’s been happening since late May, early June of this year—a steady rise upwards beyond all previous test positivity levels.
Now, as is the case with a Barbie doll, take whatever specific measurements you see with a grain of salt. The number of people getting tested at Walgreens locations has dropped like a Ken doll made out of lead. Throughout all of 2021 and much of 2022, the number of tests per week were totaling in the multiple hundreds of thousands. These tallies dipped below 100,000 for the first time in September 2022 and have steadily declined in numbers since then to the point where only 2,286 tests were done last week. This is probably because most people are either testing at home or— surprise, surprise—not testing at all even when they suspect that they may have Covid-19. Yeah, that’s what tends to happen when something is no longer required. So, it might be that nowadays people will only get tested at Walgreens if they already have a higher likelihood of having Covid-19.