While Ohio continues to see its coronavirus (COVID-19) numbers surge, Governor Mike DeWine said that the spike the state will likely see reported on Tuesday is to be expected.
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That's because Ohio is making a change to its procedure for reporting coronavirus cases and will now include presumed positive results from antigen testing.
While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its definition for counting positive cases to include antigen results in August, Ohio had continued to manually verify exposures and symptoms before counting positive results from antigen testing in its caseloads. According to DeWine, the state has been averaging 12,500 antigen tests per day with a daily average of more than 700 positive results from those tests.
With the volume of antigen testing in the state having doubled over the course of the past month, DeWine said that the Ohio Department of Health and epidemiologist teams have been unable to keep up with the manual verification process. That's created a backlog of 12,600 positive antigen tests that date back to Nov. 1 in the state's pending queue, which will be applied to the state's updated positive case definition beginning on Tuesday.
The addition of the positive antigen tests to Ohio's caseload will create a one-day spike in the state's reported coronavirus cases. DeWine said that the cases will be assigned to their appropriate onset date and that the positive tests will be checked with other results to ensure that cases aren't being counted twice.
On Monday, Ohio reported 9,273 new coronavirus cases. You can watch DeWine's full press briefing in the video below.