quote:
The test results are a lagging indicator. To make an analogy- you know how when you look up at night and see the stars you are seeing what was there thousand of light years ago and not what is there today? That’s what these numbers are. They are a snapshot not if the current number of cases. They are a snapshot of the number of cases at the time the test was conducted, which could be more than a week ago.

Except that you are also missing the fact that many people have been refused to be given tests due to not having the appropriate symptoms and many more people are asymptomatic. Therefore again, we are only testing a small portion of the population that even has it.

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Posted by Mr. Misanthrope

Cloud 8

Member since Nov 2012

5541 posts

Posted on 3/26/20 at 3:07 pm to baldona

quote:
Therefore again, we are only testing a small portion of the population that even has it.

This is a possibility. And that variable, percentage of total population infected, may be outrunning the testing by a lot. A moving target that may be shrinking or growing.

How can that variable be known if some people are being turned away from being tested? Some percentage of those people being turned away are infected and contagious and an inflated number of the people being tested are coming up positive, largely because of the test screening protocols.

I don't think we can assume those variables' differences offset. They may and they may not.

Couple this with the lag between testing and results (a confusing unknown variable at best), and the notion that we're looking at accurate "snapshots" or data points of the contagion timeline is questionable.

This post was edited on 3/26/20 at 3:30 pm

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