Access to County COVID-19 Test Positivity Rate

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) updates its COVID-19 test positivity rate by county on a regular basis. Click HERE to access data for all counties in the United States (click on link in the COVID-19 Testing section).

Please Note:

During the week of Sept. 14, 2020, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) made the following updates to its county percent test positivity characterization methodology.

  1. In order to use a greater amount of data to calculate percent test positivity and improve the stability of values, the indicator was expanded to include 14 days of data instead of seven days.
  2. Further, because there are instances where counties with high test positivity rates may reflect low testing levels rather than high levels of viral transmission, additional criteria were added to re-assign counties with low testing volume to lower nursing home staff testing tiers (i.e., communities with low levels of testing and high test positivity (>10%) are reassigned to either yellow or green testing tiers).

 Methodology

  • GREEN = Counties with test percent positivity at <5.0% OR with <20 tests in past 14 days
  • YELLOW = Counties with test percent positivity 5.0%-10.0% OR with <500 tests and <2000 tests/100k and >10% positivity over 14 days
  • RED = Counties with >10.0% and not meeting the criteria for “Green” or “Yellow”

Test positivity is rounded to the nearest tenth of a percent before classifying.

Nebraska County Test Positivity Rates: