Who gets tested is a moving target. Stanford a short time ago did a free-for-all testing binge in order to collect data, but finished that and is now restricting tests to people requiring specific risk factors to give a test.
The first time I tried to get a test from another provider I just wasn't able, they didn't know of anywhere that would test me outside of hospitalization-type symptoms.
So testing is uneven and not very available, any stats need to include some metric for the criteria to get tests in the first place.
In other words, there is likely an enormous population with no symptoms or mild symptoms who couldn't get tested if they tried.
After two video appointments with separate providers I was able to get tested yesterday and the result came back negative about 22 hours later. It took me about 8 hours of effort and time to get that done, a luxury many people do not have.
> After two video appointments with separate providers I was able to get tested yesterday and the result came back negative about 22 hours later. It took me about 8 hours of effort and time to get that done, a luxury many people do not have.
Is there any value in people self-selecting into personal choice testing? You could get infected tomorrow, for instance...
If we wanted a full picture of community spread we'd need a top-down random sample, not self-selection, no?
Aren't there ways of turning self-selection populations into random sample populations for statistical purposes? (It has just been a while since I have had to think of these things).
But really we want more than just accurate statistics, we want to minimize damage. Any increase in testing is good testing, and triaging testing to highest risk individuals makes sense when your capacity is limited.
The consequences though are that reported statistics are often just wrong. Skewed towards higher negative outcomes and comparisons between dates are flawed without much additional information.
The one I pay attention to is daily growth rate of confirmed cases. It can't cover people who aren't tested. But, it approximates the velocity of the problem's magnitude. And, over time it shows the acceleration --which reflects on how we are improving the situation, or not...
The good news is that the US has gone from a 30+% daily growth rate 10 days ago down to a 15% growth rate and falling. We need to keep falling into the negative rates to solve this problem.
me too. it has some noise from variation in testing rate, but it's directionally accurate.
for example the bay area has recently been seeing some days with single digit growth rates. shelter in place IS WORKING, but it's going to take time / we may need some additional measures. I was just reading it may also be spread in the air from breathing.
Honestly, the most important metric is deaths, and from what I can see, the SF Bay Area has done relatively well in that metric. No overcrowded hospitals, for example.
Yes, this is very important. But one should not forget also the avg. hospitalization time (which will go down once we have clear procedures for treating COVID in different stage)
Another important data point to assess testing is Case Fatality Rate (CFR). This is about 2.5% in the SF Bay Area.
In other places with higher testing, such as Australia, the CFR is 0.6% or less. This implies that the true number of cases is 4-5 times higher... probably a lot more.
It seems like this disease is so successful because of a significant symptom-free-but-contageous period followed by a small percentage of very serious symptoms.
That's what a pandemic needs. If it is very deadly very quickly it kills its transmission vectors before they can transmit. If it is entirely symptom free, it is very evolutionarily successful, but no one cares because there aren't any negative effects.
There is an "optimum" of disease characteristics for maximum damage and we seem to be experiencing one.
The bottom line is that it seems to be very difficult to prevent a majority of the world population from getting this disease and the result is going to be a global fatality rate of somewhere in the neighborhood of 1%.
What put it into perspective for me is the CDC estimate of up to 25% cases being entirely asymptomatic [1], and data from Iceland shows 50% of those tested were asymptomatic at time of testing [2].
It will be hard to trace and isolate if this is the case.
That also doesn't account for the exponential growth in number of cases; the people dying now are out of a much smaller cohort of confirmed cases in the past.
Deaths / (Deaths + Recoveries) would be more like it, and that's a scary number.
Who gets tested is a moving target. Stanford a short time ago did a free-for-all testing binge in order to collect data, but finished that and is now restricting tests to people requiring specific risk factors to give a test.
The first time I tried to get a test from another provider I just wasn't able, they didn't know of anywhere that would test me outside of hospitalization-type symptoms.
So testing is uneven and not very available, any stats need to include some metric for the criteria to get tests in the first place.
In other words, there is likely an enormous population with no symptoms or mild symptoms who couldn't get tested if they tried.
After two video appointments with separate providers I was able to get tested yesterday and the result came back negative about 22 hours later. It took me about 8 hours of effort and time to get that done, a luxury many people do not have.