Public health officials say robust testing for the coronavirus is essential to safely lifting stay-at-home orders and business closures, but states are creating confusion in the way they are reporting the data. By MRSmithAP
FILE - In this May 14, 2020, file photo, Jerry A Mann, center, is held by his grandmother, Sylvia Rubio, as he is tested for COVID-19 by the San Antonio Fire Department at a free walk-up test site in San Antonio. Public health officials have said robust testing for the coronavirus is essential to safely lifting stay-at-home orders and business closures, but states are creating confusion in the way they are reporting the data.
Such errors render the CDC numbers about how many Americans are infected “uninterpretable,” creating a misleading picture for people trying to make decisions based on the data, said Ashish Jha, director of Harvard’s Global Health Institute, Mixing the results makes it difficult to understand how the virus is spreading. It can give the false impression that the rate of positive test results is declining.
Some states combined results only briefly and say it was unintentional. Delaware said it has “shifted focus” from reporting antibody tests and toward viral tests as they have become more available following nationwide shortages. Maine, Texas, Vermont and Virginia say they have stopped lumping results together, and Georgia is working on a fix.In Georgia, antibody tests were about 14% of the total, while in Mississippi, officials said they were around 3%.
Maine officials say it’s not possible to release total test numbers more than once a week because the data must be collected from multiple outside labs doing the tests.
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