Last night’s update of the William and Mary COVID-19 dashboard showed just over 46 new positives for the prior three days.
Last year, when William and Mary itself was doing all the testing, it was hard to interpret the Monday count. The numbers had a strong up-and-down pattern over the course of the week, presumably reflecting W&Ms schedule for routine testing.
But now, by contrast, most (possibly all) of what we are seeing is testing for cause. The new COVID cases above are a mix of individuals who had themselves tested ( and reported a positive test to W&M), and symptomatic or known exposed individuals who are being tested by W&M and found to be positive.
(At some point, there will also be ongoing screening testing of the unvaccinated. And, later in the semester, W&M will test a random sample of students to estimate the prevalence of COVID-19 on campus. But for now, I think it’s mostly diagnostic testing, that is, testing for cause).
Based on that, my guess is that the test results are coming in a fairly steady stream right now.
If that’s true, we can tentatively say that the low number of new positives, per day, for the past three days, is an indication that the true rate of new positive cases per day has backed down from last week’s peak.
Obviously, there’s not enough information there to declare victory. But, arguably, there’s enough to declare non-disaster. As of today, it doesn’t look like this is any sort of out-of-hand rapidly-escalating mess.
