Tag: massachusett

Over the past three weeks, there has been little change concerning college testing.  Higher education institutions in Massachusetts continue to perform widespread testing and well outperform the state as a whole in terms of test positivity and case rates. Table 1 summarizes the testing statistics to date for the twelve Boston area institutions on which I’ve been focusing, as well as UMass Amherst .  Cumulative test positivity remains very low, with only Boston College above 0.2%.

Table 2 shows testing statistics for the past week.  There have been very small outbreaks at Bentley College and Suffolk University, but the number of cases remain small.  Boston-area colleges are in very good shape.

Higher educational testing accounts for almost half of all testing in the state.  Test positivity rates are very low in higher education (both the cumulative rate and the rate over the past week are 0.09%).  As Figure 1 indicates, this means that test positivity outside of higher education is substantially higher than the “all test” positivity rate that the state highlights in the daily dashboard.  Even as the overall test positivity rate began to increase in late September, higher education test positivity rates remained low and steady. Outside of higher education, positivity rates are now about 2.5%. In addition, since August 15, only about 4% of all confirmed Covid cases in Massachusetts are associated with higher educational institutions.