⚠️EGREGIOUS of CDC to conflate 2 diff #covid19 tests, distorting positivity metrics and providing an inaccurate picture. CDC is combining PCR tests of current virus w/ antibody tests of past infection.
➡️Highly doubt CDC career scientists wanted this. theatlantic.com/health/archive…
➡️Highly doubt CDC career scientists wanted this. theatlantic.com/health/archive…
2) Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, and other states are doing the same. Virginia previously did but apologized. Maine did too. Vermont also claims it didn’t know it was doing it, but reversed and separated since. But for CDC of all organizations to conflate the two is mind blowing!
3) “the widespread use of the practice means that it remains difficult to know exactly how much the country’s ability to test people who are actively sick with COVID-19 has improved.” @alexismadrigal, who’s done amazing job leading @COVID19Tracking
4) “You’ve got to be kidding me,” says a flabbergasted Dr Ashish Jha @ashishkjha, “How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.”
5) “The viral testing is to understand how many people are getting infected, while antibody testing is like looking in the rearview mirror. The 2 tests are totally different signals,” By combining the two results, the CDC has made them both “uninterpretable,” says @ashishkjha
6) “a spokesperson for the CDC said that the inclusion of antibody data in Florida is one reason the CDC has reported hundreds of thousands more tests in Florida than the state government has. The agency hopes to separate the viral and antibody test results in the next few weeks”
7) “The CDC stopped publishing anything resembling a complete database of daily test results on February 29. When it resumed publishing test data last week, a page of its website explaining its new COVID Data Tracker said that only viral tests were included in its figures... but:
8) “These data represent only viral tests. Antibody tests are not currently captured in these data,” the page said as recently as May 18.
Yesterday, that language was changed” 🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️
Yesterday, that language was changed” 🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️
9) “Because antibody tests are meant to be used on the general population, not just symptomatic people, they will, in most cases, have a lower %-positive rate than viral tests. So blending [them] “will drive down your positive rate in a very dramatic way,” says @ashishkjha
10) Texas caught in a lie: “The Texas Observer first reported last week that the state was lumping its viral and antibody results together. On Tuesday, Governor Greg Abbott denied that the state was blending the results, but the Dallas Observer reports that it is still doing so.”
11) “It is impossible to know the true % of positive viral tests in Texas. It is impossible to know how many of the 718,000 negative results were not meant to diagnose a sick person. The state did not return a request for comment, nor produced data describing results separately.”
12) Georgia did same. Like Texas, it reported >20,000 new results on Wednesday, the majority of them negative. But cuz it is also blending its viral & antibody results together, its true %-positive rate is impossible to know. (@BrianKempGA @GovKemp office did not respond)
13) “These results damage the public’s ability to understand what is happening in any one state. On national scale, they call the strength of America’s response to #COVID19 into question.” ~@alexismadrigal & @yayitsrob ➡️ thanks for great reporting & @COVID19Tracking team’s work!
