It turns out the CDC’s testing numbers can’t be trusted

  

The news recently came out that the CDC’s daily numbers for total tests include both tests for the presence of Covid-19 itself, as well as tests to determine whether a person has antibodies to Covid-19. It seems they’ve been doing this all along and not letting people know about it; in fact, it seems they don’t even still have the raw numbers they certainly had originally, showing results of tests from different testing stations (since the people giving tests for the virus are usually different from those giving antibody tests). In fact, antibody tests have only been available in any quantity in the last month or so.

The problem with this is that the two tests are identifying two different groups of people. The virus test identifies people who are now infected with Covid-19. The antibody test identifies people who were infected at some point (and usually didn’t know it since their symptoms were mild, if they had any symptoms at all). Epidemiologists have been assuming all along that the tests just reflect people who are currently sick – and thus are at risk of infecting others, as well as dying themselves.

But it turns out they’re just a measure of how many people have been sick over the course of the pandemic in the US (although just those who happen to have been tested, since testing still isn’t available in anywhere near the volume that’s needed to get the pandemic under control, especially as opening up continues). It’s important for epidemiologists to know how many people in total were infected, if they’re studying the pandemic after it’s over. But knowing this has little value when their goal is to try to bring the pandemic under control while it’s happening.

Atlantic magazine posted an excellent article about this problem last week. It rightly asked how it’s possible the CDC could possibly make a mistake like this. With all the scientists they have on staff, didn’t somebody know enough to point this out? Maybe we should take away all their PhDs and MDs.

But of course, this wasn’t a mistake. It might have been for the first day or two, but the fact that it continued this long – and had to be discovered by outsiders – is clear indication that this was deliberate. Why? Well, the White House has been boasting for some time that tests have grown rapidly, which is true, and that means tests are now freely available for all purposes, which isn’t true at all. But since the tests that count are the ones that find out who is sick now, this means even the inadequate level of testing that we thought we had is actually a big overestimate.

Of course, the CDC’s biggest “mistake” of the whole pandemic is that, after their initial attempt to develop a test was botched, they didn’t import the WHO’s test, which was freely available and already in wide use in a lot of countries like South Korea. Instead, they lost 2-3 crucial weeks in February coming up with their own test, and then for at least a couple weeks the only way anybody in the country could be tested was to have their nasal swab shipped to Atlanta. This is the number one reason why the US, which was identified by Johns Hopkins last year as the country best prepared to deal with a pandemic, will go down in history as the country that most bungled their response (and continues to bungle it), paying a terrible price in the process.

And today we’ll likely pass the grim milestone of 100,000 deaths, with certainly no end in sight.

The numbers

These numbers are updated every day, based on reported US Covid-19 deaths the day before (taken from the Worldometers.info site, where I’ve been getting my numbers all along). No other variables go into these numbers – they are all projections based on yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total Covid-19 deaths, which was 9%.

Note that the “accuracy” of the projected numbers diminishes greatly after 3-4 weeks. This is because, up until 3-4 weeks, deaths could in theory be predicted very accurately, if one knew the real number of cases. In other words, the people who are going to die in the next 3-4 weeks of Covid-19 are already sick with the disease, even though they may not know it yet. But this means that the trend in deaths should be some indicator of the level of infection 3-4 weeks previous.

However, once we get beyond 3-4 weeks, deaths become more and more dependent on policies and practices that are put in place – or removed, as is more the case nowadays - after today (as well as other factors like the widespread availability of an effective treatment, if not a real “cure”). Yet I still think there’s value in just trending out the current rate of increase in deaths, since it gives some indication of what will happen in the near term if there are no intervening changes.

However, it’s 100% certain that deaths won’t stop at the end of June! They might decline some more this summer, but Drs. Redfield (CDC head) and Fauci both predict there will be a new wave of the virus in the fall, and one noted study said there was a good probability the fall wave would be greater than the one we’re in now, as happened in the 1918 pandemic.

Week ending	Deaths reported during week/month	Avg. deaths per day during week/month	Deaths as percentage of previous month’s
March 7	18	3
March 14	38	5
March 21	244	35
March 28	1,928	275
Month of March	4,058	131
April 4	6,225	889
April 11	12,126	1,732
April 18	18,434	2,633
April 25	15,251	2,179
Month of April	59,812	1,994 (= 1 death every 44 seconds)	1,474%
May 2	13,183	1,883
May 9	12,592	1,799
May 16	10,073	1,439
May 23	8,570	1,224
May 30	9,024	1,289
Month of May	44,510	1,459 (=1 death every 60 seconds)	74%
June 6	9,850	1,407
June 13	10,750	1,536
June 20	11,734	1,676
June 27	12,807	1,830
Month of June	49,781	1,659 (= 1 death every 52 seconds)	112%
Total March - June	158,161

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 99,300

Increase in deaths since previous day: 617 (vs. 1,036 yesterday)

Percent increase in deaths since previous day: 1% (this number was 1% yesterday)

Yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total deaths: 9% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above – it was 10% yesterday. There is a 7-day cycle in deaths, caused by lack of reporting over the weekends from closed state offices. So this is the only reliable indicator of a trend in deaths, not the one-day percent increase I used to focus on).

II. Total reported cases

I no longer pay any attention to the reported case number. It is a huge underestimate of actual cases, which is at least 5-10 times what’s reported. This is because of the huge shortage of testing capacity. For reported cases to be anywhere near actual cases, we would need to be doing millions of tests a day. I believe the US has done fewer than 7 million tests since the start of the pandemic.

Total US reported cases: 1,686,436

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 19,607

Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 1%

Percent increase in reported cases since 7 days previous: 10%

III. Deaths as a percentage of closed cases so far in the US:

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 451,702

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 99,300

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 18% (vs. 18% yesterday) Let’s be clear. This means that, of all the coronavirus cases that have been closed so far in the US, 18% of them have resulted in death. Compare this with the comparable number from South Korea, which is below 3%. China’s is 6%. The reason this number is so high is that total reported recoveries are so low. I’ve been assuming since March 26, when the recoveries number was first published, that it would rise, so that this percentage (which was 41% on March 26), would be far lower than it is now. It still has to drop a lot, but it currently seems to be making some progress. Hopefully it will be down to at most 6% in the near future.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com