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Originally Posted by zoltan
At some point, laptard made one of his trademarked context free posts about testing numbers increasing
Welp
Coronavirus and CDC: Test Counting Error Leaves Epidemiologists ‘Really Baffled’ https://nyti.ms/3c2EV17
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Quote:
Originally Posted by zoltan
Lol the article explained exactly why we can't say testing has gone up.
Also, NY dominates any curve, so unless you remove that ENORMOUS outlier, any statements about patterns are nonsense.
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Heh... I go away for a couple days and I see Lil'Zolly is trying to act all adult and stuff...
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Lol the article explained exactly why we can't say testing has gone up.
Obvious Lil'Zolly only read the headline.
Here's the full URL so folks can actually find the information Lil'Zolly is shouting about.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/22/u...tests-cdc.html
Let's actually read the article shall we?
Quote:
C.D.C. Test Counting Error Leaves Epidemiologists ‘Really Baffled’
The Centers for Disease Control has been lumping together tests for active coronavirus with tests for recovered patients, boosting testing totals but muddying the pandemic’s course.
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Sheila Kaplan and Sarah Mervosh
May 22, 2020
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 Trump boasts about testing.
Now that serology tests, which look for antibodies in the blood of people who have recovered, are more widespread, C.D.C. officials said Friday they would work to separate them from the results of diagnostic tests, which detect active infection. One of the agency’s data tracker websites has been lumping them together.
Stunned epidemiologists say data from antibody tests and active virus tests should never be mixed because diagnostic testing seeks to quantify the amount of active disease in the population. Serological testing can also be unreliable. And patients who have had both diagnostic and serology tests would be counted twice in the totals.
“It just doesn’t make any sense; all of us are really baffled,” said Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida.
Hmm... so "all of us" are "really baffled"? If all you do is read the headline or perhaps the first couple paragraphs, yes, this does look bad...
No... REALLY BAD!!!!!
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A spokeswoman for the C.D.C., Kristen Nordlund, said viral testing was much more common than antibody testing in the pandemic’s early days, and some states combined the virus tests together with the few antibody results they had.
“Now that serology testing is more widely available, C.D.C. is working to differentiate those tests from the viral tests and will report this information, differentiated by test type, publicly on our Covid Data Tracker website in the coming weeks,” Ms. Nordlund said.
I mean, sure, we're never going to believe a word the current Fed.gov says (well, unless its about doing alternating shots of Clorox and Lysol, if you're stupid enough to go for this then might I suggest you chase it with a Tide pod?), so yes, we can continue to be "really baffled" (at least here in the first 7 paragraphs, shall we stop reading here or shall we continue further down the article?).
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State health officials in Virginia, Texas, Georgia and Vermont also said they were beginning to disaggregate their testing data.
“This is not an intentional misuse of information — it’s part of the fog of the infectious disease war,” said Michael T. Osterholm, a University of Minnesota professor and former state epidemiologist who was sharply critical of the disease control centers early in the pandemic. “We’ve done surveillance for cases, and now we’re all trying to do testing, and it presents unique challenges.”
I don't know who this guy Osterholm is, but he doesn't sound "really baffled". He's probably a stooge then?
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“For the 20 years that I’ve been a public health leader, we’ve never focused on testing, and this is a new virus, so we are still learning about it,” Dr. Peake said Friday. “The tests are being developed, and we are still learning how to interpret them.”
Dr. Peake doesn't seem "really baffled". The Grey Lady (having a senior moment?) deemed it important to include this opinion (although, it is 22 paragraphs down, where I'm sure Lil'Zolly's attention span would have had long given up, if on the off chance he did give it the ol'college try to read the story).
The criticism is that the antibody test results have in some cases, so far, been combined with active case test results. Seems like the NYT report indicates that this is being corrected.
How serious has this been and what effect on the data/reporting has it had to date?
Importantly, does it justify Lil'Zolly's lament, "we can't say testing has gone up."?
Let's continue to read the article and see what the damning information is...
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Serology, or antibody, tests accounted for 9 percent of tests in Virginia, Mr. 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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Serology tests accounted for 4 percent of all tests in Vermont, he said, and including them may have increased the percent positive rate by “a fraction of one percentage point.”
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In Georgia, a state that is being closely watched after it became one of the first to reopen businesses last month, officials said they were working to improve transparency after reports that up to 15 percent of the state’s tests were antibody tests. While Georgia’s coronavirus caseload has remained more or less the same in recent weeks, the latest developments raised questions about the accuracy of the numbers.
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The Pennsylvania Department of Health is still using a small number of positive antibody tests to inform the state’s total case numbers, a spokesman, Nate Wardle, said on Friday. But he said those antibody tests were not skewing results — they represent less than 1 percent of total cases in the state, he said — and were not being used to decide whether regions should reopen.
Hmmm...
-- "would not have drastically changed the state’s overall results"
-- "may have increased the percent positive rate by “a fraction of one percentage point.”
-- "up to 15 percent of the state’s tests were antibody tests."
-- "antibody tests were not skewing results — they represent less than 1 percent of total cases in the state, he said"
I presume if The Grey Lady had access to more damning information, they would have used it. Certainly, the above information does not seem like it rises to the "really baffled" level of incredulity.
We get 25+ paragraphs down and we see that its likely Lil'Zolly didn't read the article and that yes, we can be reasonably certain that testing is indeed going up.
In fact, testing for currently infected persons and apparently previously infected persons (critical in discovering where the spread has been given that there may be data that shows upwards of 35% of infected persons never develop any symptoms) are both going up.
