WASHINGTON -- As it tracks the coronavirus's spread, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is combining tests that detect active infection with those that detect recovery from COVID-19 -- a system that muddies the picture of the pandemic but raises the percentage of Americans tested as President
WASHINGTON — As it tracks the coronavirus’s spread, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is combining tests that detect active infection with those that detect recovery from COVID-19 — a system that muddies the picture of the pandemic but raises the percentage of Americans tested as President Donald Trump boasts about testing.
Epidemiologists, state health officials and a spokeswoman for the CDC said there was no ill intent; they attributed the flawed reporting system to confusion and fatigue in overworked state and local health departments that typically track infections — not tests — during outbreaks. The CDC relies on states to report their data.
State health officials in Virginia, Texas, Georgia and Vermont also said they were beginning to disaggregate their testing data. Scott Becker, the executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, said there was another reason states were tracking testing: Trump wants the numbers. “What that means is that those tests are more likely to come back negative, which means that you could end up with a misleading picture overall,” he said. “You’ll think there is less disease there than there actually is. That is not something that is not going to be helpful, to say the least.”
But a few days later, Northam, who is a physician, said he had only recently learned that the data was being combined and had since directed the health department to disaggregate the results. Serology, or antibody, tests accounted for 9% of tests in Virginia, Northam said — a figure that Dr. Lilian Peake, the Virginia state epidemiologist, said would not have drastically changed the state’s overall results.
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