Analysis: The difficulties in tracking COVID trends

It seems like everyone has Covid-19. Here’s why this wave is probably worse than official data suggests | CNN Covid-19 certainly didn’t take a vacation this summer. Virus levels in the US have been on the rise for weeks, but it’s hard to know exactly how widely it’s spreading. CNN

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Tracking Covid-19 trends has always had its challenges. But the rise of rapid home tests — and general waning of public interest in testing at all — has all but erased the ability to grasp current case counts nationwide. The CDC officially stopped reporting aggregate Covid-19 case counts months ago, noting that data had become less representative of actual infections or transmission levels over time.

As case counts started to become less reliable, some experts first pointed to hospitalization metrics as a reasonable substitute to gauge transmission. Hospitals were regularly testing all patients, whether they were coming in for Covid-related symptoms or for something else entirely, and they are required to report positive cases. The idea was that case rates in a hospital could serve as a proxy for case rates in the broader community.

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