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Hey y'all. I have a deep dive today on how the number of *known coronavirus cases* isn't really a good way to know what's happening with the disease. Unless you know something about testing, anyway. Hope you'll check it out.
fivethirtyeight.com/features/coron…
People keep treating disparities in testing and other reporting problems as though they're rounding errors. They are...anything but. They can completely swamp the actual signal from case #'s. Unless you make an effort to account for them, you run a high risk of misleading people.
There are also some mathy bits in here, including a link to spreadsheet where you can input your own assumptions about tests and see how they affect the number of reported cases in a hypothetical country. But I hope the article is useful whether or not you're math-inclined.
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