The idiots at the CDC have been mixing together testing numbers from active COVID-19 cases with serology (antibody?) tests. Here is a semi-paywalled article:
Epidemiologists in the article seem to think this is disastrous, since you want to trace active cases separately from recovered cases, maybe?
For the doctors and epidemiologists here – how big of a screw-up is this?
For the rest of you – do you think this was done on purpose to inflate our testing number or just incompetence?
I think this was done on purpose to satisfy this administration’s need to show how much testing we’re doing in order to try and open things up again. However, given the anti-science nature of this administration, it’s possible that many of the good scientists at the CDC have left.
The COVID Tracking Project, which is run by some of The Atlantic staff members, believe that at least two other states are also combining data to inflate their numbers; see https://covidtracking.com/blog/antibody-data-reporting .
Not sure how much is was done with intent to mislead … Hanlon’s razor may apply.
That said, conflating a small number of antibody tests in with the PCR results seem to me to be the least of the reasons why absolute number of tests done and fraction positive is of currently very limited value.
I have a hard time believing that many epidemiologists were actually “stunned” … or were using those aggregated figures as the actual inputs for any models they are building. I’d actually be stunned by the latter!