Officials say coronavirus testing is vital to safely lifting stay-at-home orders and business closures, but states are reporting the data differently.
Elected officials, businesses and others are depending on coronavirus testing and infection-rate data as states reopen so that they will know if a second wave of contagion is coming — and whether another round of stay-at-home orders or closings might be needed.
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.“It is incumbent on health departments and the CDC to make sure they’re presenting information that’s accurate. And if they can’t get it, then don’t show the data at all,” Jha said. “Faulty data is much, much worse than no data.
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.The CDC told the Associated Press on Friday that the problem started several weeks ago when the agency began collecting data from states using an electronic reporting system that had been developed for other diseases. At the time, nearly all lab results being reported were from live viral testing.
The CDC also gave the AP a list of 18 states it said had reported viral tests only, but that list included Pennsylvania, Virginia and Vermont, all of which have said they mixed the two kinds of tests together. Kansas’ governor used to open media briefings with daily reports on positive test results and deaths but stopped doing that in early May when she began a push to reopen.Meanwhile, health officials in Georgia, one of the first states to ease restrictions, published a graph showing dates out of chronological order, making a decline appear smoother than it actually was. The state health commissioner vowed to do better.
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