Covid 19 — What the Data Tells Us
The Punchline: We got it wrong and now we’re largely tracking it wrong...
Did you know the “new cases” in daily reports are actually “old infections newly reported”??? Most of what is reported is old news and not indicative of what is happening or how we are trending.
We must look at “Date of Onset” to do ACCURATE trend analysis, but the CDC stopped reporting onset data in April.
Using our own Data from the CDC, we can see that while 45,000 cases were reported on March 23, in reality we already had 140,000 positive tests that had yet to be reported (date of onset).
And now that we know testing only captured 5–10% of actual infections, based on multiple studies, it appears at least several million (yes Million) were already infected by March 23rd, which were never tested.
The CDC is also now combining PCR & Antibody tests, so the “new cases” could be some of the millions of cases from 4 months ago. NPR called them out on it.
Per Nate Silver, a world renowned Statistician, the average person might as well ignore the cases being reported, it’s apples and oranges.
We are suffering from data illiteracy in this country — from the Institutions capturing it (like the CDC), to the Politicians making decisions from it, to the Media reporting on…
