OHIO – Governor Dewine said that 18 states have a positivity rate of over 15% and those states are cautioned not to visit.
Positivity rate is an indicator of how much COVID-19 there is in a community, and ODH is recommending against travel to those states with high positivity. If someone must travel, ODH is recommending 14 days of self-quarantine after leaving those locations. This advisory is intended for both leisure and business travel, and should be heeded by both Ohioans and out-of-state travelers. It is intended as guidance and is not a mandate—please consider the information here along with other factors (mode of transportation, lodging, activities, ability to social distance when traveling, personal health factors, etc.) when making travel decisions for yourself and your family.
The positivity rates come from state-level aggregate data from The COVID Tracking Project (https://covidtracking.com/data), which is also the source that Johns Hopkins University uses for testing data on their dashboard at https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/testing/individual-states. Positivity information for Ohio’s travel advisory is updated once a week on Wednesdays, using data from that Tuesday. Positivity rates may have changed since our most recent update.
As of October 21, The COVID Tracking Project is updating their processes for pulling data from individual states, and multiple states are also in the process of changing how they calculate and report their own data. Even with these challenges, The COVID Tracking Project is still the most consistent and timely source of state-level testing information.
Based on a 7-day rolling average of positivity rates of November 25, the affected states are:
| WY | 57.3% |
| SD | 43.4% |
| IA | 41.1% |
| ID | 41.0% |
| KS | 38.2% |
| PA | 25.3% |
| NM | 24.0% |
| AL | 22.4% |
| MO | 22.1% |
| MT | 21.0% |
| AZ | 20.0% |
| UT | 19.0% |
| MS | 18.0% |
| OR | 16.0% |
| WI | 15.3% |
| TN | 15.3% |
