COVID Testing Access

Testing Site Metrics: Potential Community Demand

This analysis and metric were inspired by the work of Kim et al.1 in their FiveThirtyEight’s article on distribution of testing sites. The purpose of this blog is to describe how we adapted their ‘Potential Community Need’ metric to calculate ‘Potential Community Demand (PCD)’ (a summary of how high the demand for testing could be for each neighborhood when accounting for resident population) in order to describe inequities in testing access on our Dashboard.

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Testing Site Metrics: Spatial Accessibility

Spatial accessibility to COVID-19 testing is an indicator of whether residents of a particular neighborhood have access to nearby COVID-19 testing. We used data provided by Castlight Health Inc. containing the location of testing sites in the 30 BCHC cities to construct two spatial accessibility measures: A walkshed-based measure: a neighborhood is defined as having high access if at least 25% of its area is within a 15 minute walk of a testing site.

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