Covid-19 NSW: Testing patterns across Northern Beaches and the rest of NSW

Last Updated: 2021-01-19

Data: NSW COVID-19 Tests Data

The data description says: “The data is for COVID-19 tests and is based on where a person has been tested and is undergoing public health management at the time of the test. A surge in total number of people tested on a particular day may occur as the test results are updated in batches and new laboratories gain testing capacity.”

As a result, the numbers that I am reporting here at each day, may not match the number that is reported by the NSW Health on the daily number of tests. Basically, I am reporting the number of tests done each day while the number at the press conference is the number of tests processed the day before until 8pm.

Data is sourced from Data.NSW. You can access it here

A potential issue with the data

While updating this post on Dec 20th I noticed that for some reason the last data point seems to only report around half of the number of observations compared to the days before. As a result, I have marked them as Incomplete.

Tests Done vs. Tests Reported

See my post here on the difference between the two sets of testing data that NSW publishes and how you can use each of them to see how the situation is evolving across the state. here

Total Number of Tests

Covid-19 Testing Patterns at LGA Level

So, to keep things simple, I have only shown three lines here. One is the number of tests done across the Northern Beaches LGA (NB), one for the tests that did not have a location recorded (so they may or may not be NB), and one for the rest of NSW.

Tests per 100K of Population

If you are interested to see the numbers in per capita format, here is the plot for you. I have removed the “missing location” category here and used 2016 census population data to calculate the per capita values.

Tests per 100K of Population to Monitor Cumberland

I have started to follow the test numbers for Cumberland separately.

This one is the per capita measure comparing the Northern Beaches with the rest of Greater Sydney.

Covid-19 Testing Patterns across LGAs with at least one positive case excluding the Northern Beaches Area

Here I have the testing trends for all the LGAs with at least one positive case of Covid-19 as of the last data available by Data.NSW. By clicking on the LGA name in the legend area, you can select and plot the ones you are interested in.

Covid-19 Testing Per Capita across LGAs with at least one positive case excluding the Northern Beaches Area

Reminder

Just a reminder that administrative data such as this dataset need to be analysed and interpreset carefully since the data is not collected for the purpose of this analysis but to be used to manage the Covid-19 testing and contact tracing. I would add more plots to this post and will try to keep it regularly updated as future data points arrive.

Visit our Covid-19 Australia App

Visit our Apps section to access more data on Covid-19 and its impact on Australia here