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The CDC case numbers are useless. Aside from the "probable" case issue, for a long time they were also including antibody tests in the total. Antibody tests m
by nostrademons 6y ago
The CDC case numbers are useless. Aside from the "probable" case issue, for a long time they were also including antibody tests in the total. Antibody tests measure the number of people who have ever had coronavirus, not the number of active infections, thus conflating two very different statistics.
Most coronavirus trackers aggregate state & county level data, which doesn't suffer from the same blatant incompetence as the CDC data. It tells the same story, though: case counts are increasing exponentially, with a current doubling time of about a week, and the percent positive rate (a measure of how much testing is undercounting the true infection rate) is rapidly going up in many locations.
- zaroth 6y agoEven the NYT COVID tracker page has the following note; “In the tallies shown on this page, The Times is now including cases that have been identified by public health officials as probable coronavirus patients.”