Why a Massive New Covid Wave Has Escaped the Data

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-covid-pandemics-daily-case-count-comes-up-short-in-the-u-s-11653643802

No paywall
https://archive.ph/vYuJ8

The U.S. has lost count of Covid cases.

For the past two pandemic years, nearly everyone has obsessed over the daily number of reported Covid-19 infections.

A web search for “Covid” or “coronavirus” yields, as the first chart, the reported number of Covid-19 cases. The number is also the first item in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid data tracker.

It is a statistic that is far off the actual number of coronavirus infections, and likely getting worse.

Today, there are abundant home tests that typically aren’t reported to health agencies, and thus never get included in case counts. State-run testing centers, which once fed case totals directly into the numbers, have been curtailed.

*snip*

[MontanaFarmer]

1. We're in it.

My wife works on an elementary school, and got exposed on the last day of the school year. Frustrating. We did report the positive home test. I continue to test negative but do have some symptoms. Nothing severe for either of us yet.

[Chainfire]

2. The people are tired of hearing about Covid.

A million Americans died of it, but what about her emails?

[global1]

3. Isn't This What We Are Experiencing Now - What Tr**p Said.....

“When you test, you have a case". “When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.”

[2naSalit]

4. In my state...

As soon as the bodyslammer took office the state web site changed and made it harder to find the daily infection count and they had vaccination data instead.

[Hugin]

5. They say it is the cost of doing business...

No, wait that was the other mouthpiece at the NRA. Probably the same attitude though.

With business like this who needs that business?

[Hortensis]

6. Also, symptomatic cases are now typically milder, causing fewer

to seek medical care or test. With case counts not just highly inaccurate, but currently less meaningful indicators in some respects for evaluation, shift is to evaluating those cases serious enough to lead to hospitalization.

Experts say more lethal variants could still develop -- the pandemic is ongoing. But in this phase the common variants have become endemic, like cold viruses.

[myccrider]

7. Yeah, this. n/t