https://www.njspotlight.com/2020/10/whats-driving-covid-19-spike-lakewood-ocean-county-orthodox-jewish-community-fears/This week, the township of just over 100,000 rose to the top of the state’s list of municipalities with the most positive cases as a percentage of population — 54.4 per 1,000 residents, according to an NJ Spotlight News analysis, or just over 5% of the township. That represents a doubling of coronavirus infection just since August.
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It is hard to ignore, as Persichilli put it at the Oct. 2 roundtable, the negative impacts of Lakewood’s “large gatherings — weddings, funerals — where social distancing and wearing masks may not have been consistently followed.” But it is also true that the state’s ramping up of testing and tracing in the township will feed the counterpoint — often used by President Trump — that more testing only reveals more cases, not an outbreak.
Unfortunately, the calculus is not that simple. More testing doesn’t necessarily predicate a higher positivity rate. Testing across the state has increased since the beginning of October, and the daily positivity rate — the percentage of all tests performed each day that are positive — has hovered at just under 3%. Unpacking that number by town, however, is revealing. Lakewood’s last reported daily positivity rate, on Sept. 26, was 27%, nearly 10 times the state average, and its 5,639 current cases make up 36% of Ocean County’s total.