Quote
from
New battle emerges over COVID-19 tests[
thehill.com]
“If you’re giving a message to the public that things are fine, we’re just testing more, without really saying ... we’re doing the same number of tests ... that’s giving the public misinformation that may influence how they act,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security.
States judge the severity of their outbreaks by other metrics than just the number of tests conducted and total number of cases. Among other measures, the key is the percentage of tests that come back positive.
“It’s not useful just to look at a number of cases, you have to look at the percent positivity. If that’s rising, then I really think that you can’t just attribute that to testing,” he said.
Adalja faulted the administration for deliberately missing the nuance and misleading the public. He said the White House coronavirus task force, which Pence leads, has been tracking positivity rates since the start of the pandemic.
Some states have seen the rate of new cases increasing faster than the increase in the average number of tests.
...
“The overall trend isn’t up, and that’s because a lot of states continue to go down in the North and the Northeast, but there are states with bona fide outbreaks, and they need to get it under control,” [former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott] Gottlieb said.
