The biggest problem with the latest Covid stats

By TATIANA PROPHET

Many people are sharing on social media some charts showing a massive step up in cases in the United States, proclaiming doomsday. Some media are even calling this “America’s Chernobyl.”

Except there’s one thing missing: America has tested more people for SARS-Cov-2 than any other country (except apparently China — a relatively new data point). Sure, it’s easy to discount the massive testing numbers because President Trump is the one who said it; but the data bears it out.

As of June 30, 2020, the United States has conducted 34,858,578 tests. That’s more than anyone in the world except for what China is reporting — which is a new number (90,410,000 according to Worldometers, and there’s no breakdown of how many of those are serological (antigen) blood tests that would indicate past and not current cases). What does an increase in testing mean? It means that more cases are becoming known. But that still doesn’t tell us how bad the situation is. How bad is it? Well in spite of the spike in daily cases in the U.S., daily deaths have not spiked. In fact, they are going down.

So how much does the death count matter? It matters a lot. In California, half of all the nearly 6,000 deaths are in patients over 75 years old. And more than 2,000 are in patients over 80. The current positive cases right now are among young people; but the death rate is extremely low.

And there’s a different curve that many Americans have missed: the percent positive cases present a much different visual: the percent positive cases are going down. See below. Context. Perspective. Stay tuned.