The reification of data

Every day you are reading reports of the number of new Covid cases and deaths in your state, the U.S., other countries and the whole world. You need to know that these numbers are false. They may give an indication of trends, but they are not the actual number of cases and deaths.Let ' s start with cases. The definition of a " case " can vary, but for the most part the numbers you see are the number of positive PCR tests. This is obviously a function of how many people get tested and the sampling frame for those tests. Right now in the U.S. we are not testing a random sample of the population anywhere. We are largely only testing people who present with severe enough symptoms to consider hospitalization, and some other situations such as the residents of nursing homes with a positive case. What we ought to be doing is what South Korea started doing from the beginning: testing all the contacts of known cases so that people who tested positive could be isolated. That ' s how they got control of the epidemic early, but it ' s far too late for that in the U.S. Therefore we actually have no idea how many people in the U.S. are, or have been infected.There ' s another problem.The test we ' re using in the U.S. is not very sensitive. The best estimate is that it ' s 70% sensitive which means that nearly one third of people who are in fact infected will test negative. In much of the world, there is even less capacity to test and in many places people who get sick don ' t even get med...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs