| > I could care less about actual case counts - few countries are close to having the capacity to test everyone so who cares. Indeed, the total positive test count tells you more about changes in your testing capacity and testing criteria than it tells you about the infected population. I suppose it’s helpful in establishing the lower bound, but with no error bars on the possible upper bound. Testing a statistically valid random sample of the population would be neither difficult or expensive. Running these tests every few days across every major metropolitan areas would be extremely useful data to report the current active infection rates. This is useful even without an antibody test, but of course much more useful with an antibody test, because then you know not just active infection percentages but total infected percentages. I can’t begin to speculate why this data is either not being collected or not being made available. Death rate is somewhat useful but very lagging and also limited by not knowing the true IFR. The only other proxy we have for guessing the total infection rate in a population is the percentage of positive tests. In NY there are districts which have 50% of tests coming back positive, which is so high as to be almost unbelievable. If that data is correct and at all indicative of the general population, it is, counter-intuitively, extremely good news. https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d... |