The news just broke that in a boneheaded move the US Center for Disease Control has been combining the results from the virus test with the results of the antibody test in its statistics without telling anybody, and that makes the results almost impossible to interpret. The virus test is the gold standard and tells you if you have the virus right now; if you're sick but the test is negative then something other than COVID-19 is making you ill. The less accurate antibody test tells you if you've ever been exposed to the virus and a positive result may mean you are immune from the virus. One test looks ahead the other looks behind.
The virus test is only administered to those who already have symptoms of COVID-19, but the antibody test is being given to the general population at random and has a much higher false negative result than the virus test, so combining those results will very strongly drive down the positive rate statistics. And states have been using these very questionable statistics to decide when it is safe to reopen! How Could the CDC Make That Mistake? <https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/05/cdc-and-states-are-misreporting-covid-19-test-data-pennsylvania-georgia-texas/611935/> Meanwhile a disease computer model says that if the lockdown had started just one week earlier in March at least 36,000 American lives could have been saved. <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/us/coronavirus-live-updates.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage>Delay in Lockdown Led to at Least 36,000 More Deaths, Models Find <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/us/coronavirus-live-updates.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage> John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv1ii59-fUDD%2Bz3tviJDoHgWfwr_-KAQO-9ZihgX4Uk_4w%40mail.gmail.com.
