A. SUMMARY Case information on COVID-19 Laboratory testing. This data includes a daily count of test results reported, and how many of those were positive, negative, and indeterminate. Reported tests include tests with a positive, negative or indeterminate result. Indeterminate results, which could not conclusively determine whether COVID-19 virus was present, are not included in the calculation of percent positive. Testing for the novel coronavirus is available through commercial, clinical, and hospital laboratories, as well as the SFDPH Public Health Laboratory.

Tests are de-duplicated by an individual and date. This means that if a person gets tested multiple times on different dates in the last 30 days, all of those individual tests will be included in this data as individual tests (on each specimen collection date).

Total positive test results is not equal to the total number of COVID-19 cases in San Francisco.

B. HOW THE DATASET IS CREATED Laboratory test volume and positivity for COVID-19 is based on electronic laboratory test reports. Deduplication, quality assurance measures and other data verification processes maximize accuracy of laboratory test information.

C. UPDATE PROCESS Updates automatically at 05:00 Pacific Time each day. A redundant run is scheduled at 09:00 in case of pipeline failure.

D. HOW TO USE THIS DATASET Due to the high degree of variation in the time needed to complete tests by different labs there is a delay in this reporting. On March 24 the Health Officer ordered all labs in the City to report complete COVID-19 testing information to the local and state health departments. In order to track trends over time, a data user can analyze this data by "result_date" and see how the count of reported results and positivity rate have changed over time.

E. CHANGE LOG

• 10/28/2025 - Updated the COVID-19 testing dataset to correct an error in historical data submissions. This will result in changes to testing volume and positivity over time.
• 4/10/2024 - An issue with our testing data was identified and corrected leading to a small increase in testing records over time.
• 6/21/2023 - A small number of additional COVID-19 testing records were released as part of our ongoing data cleaning efforts.
• 1/31/2023 - renamed column “last_updated_at” to “data_as_of”.
• 1/31/2023 - added columns “cumulative_tests”, “cumulative_positive_tests”, “cumulative_negative_tests”, “cumulative_indeterminate_tests”.
• 4/16/2021 - dataset updated to refresh with a five-day data lag.