Santa Clara County’s public and private health facilities are now beating the state’s COVID-19 testing targets, according to new data posted online.
The county reported numbers Monday that suggest its expansion of testing sites plus the response of private providers to an “on-demand” testing order is having an impact on testing totals. County data show that testing increased significantly in the month following the June 10 county order.
In the last 30 days, the county reported more than 8,000 tests on five different days. In previous 30 days, testing totals passed 6,000 only once.
Nearly 25,000 COVID-19 tests were given in the preceding seven days to county residents, an average of 3,542 per day, or approximately 177 per 100,000 citizens.
California has set an initial goal of at least 150 daily tests per 100,000 people. Bay Area County Health Officers set a goal of 200 daily tests per 100,000, and county officials are saying they need more than twice that.
Santa Clara County public health officials on June 10 said private health systems needed to “step up” to boost the effort to expand COVID-19 testing, enabling the contact tracing considered vital to curbing the spread of the virus. The county required the private healthcare system to begin providing on-demand virus testing.
Private healthcare systems serve 80 percent of the public, according to county estimates. For the most recent seven-day period with complete test results, only the largest regional private healthcare system, Kaiser, serving 600,000 people, exceeded state targets. Kaiser conducted 6,522 tests, or 155 a day per 100,000 people, in that period.
Santa Clara County, which serves approximately 300,000, conducted 10,994 tests in the same seven-day period, many of them at the county’s new free “pop-up” sites.
Based on the July 20 weekly update of the testing numbers in Santa Clara County, Stanford Health reported 2,456 tests last week on the county’s COVID-19 dashboard and Palo Alto Medical Foundation/Sutter Health reported giving 1,998 virus tests.
The county said that while its health system serves about 15 percent of the local population, it still is conducting more than half of all COVID-19 tests. A month ago, county health officials said 90 percent of the tests were being conducted by the county.
Since January, 308,895 COVID-19 have been given to county residents, with 8,654 positive results, most in the past two months.
The county also announced it has released the complete data tables underlying its published dashboards tracking COVID-19 testing, cases, deaths, and hospital utilization. Accessible online via the County’s Open Data Portal, these data tables contain full information from those dashboards, from the first cases in our area through the present.
“The downloadable format enables further analysis by researchers, journalists, community organizations, or interested members of the public,” the county said in a statement about the data platform.
The county said the data tables will be regularly updated to add the most recent information from the dashboards. “The county closely tracks the spread of disease and healthcare-system response in our area, and will continue to make more data available as response activities evolve,” officials said.
This week’s free “pop-up” sites are listed below.
San Jose
County of Santa Clara Service Center Auditorium
1555 Berger Drive
10am to 3 pm, Tuesday to Thursday
San Jose High School Cafeteria
275 N. 24th St.
1 to 6pm, Tuesday to Friday
9am to 2pm, Saturday
Gilroy
South County Annex (formerly Antonio Del Buono Elementary)
9300 Wren Ave.
10am to 3pm, Tuesday to Friday
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