'Without insights into where infection is spreading, you're flying blind.'
Dr. Adeline Fagan from Syracuse, New York, was a second-year resident in Houston who delivered babies and treated COVID-19 patients during the pandemic and was 28 years old when she died of the virus.
"Testing has always been at the heart of how we get out of COVID, because without insights into where infection is spreading, you're flying blind. Our response is heavily based on test results, in terms of which phase of reopenings we're in and whether we have to go into lockdown," said John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children's Hospital and ABC News contributor.The CDC only includes polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, tests in its count.
Keeping track of diagnostic testing at a national level is essential not only for accurately counting confirmed COVID-19 cases, but also for guiding our efforts to control the pandemic. Unfortunately, it seems that many states either don't report data from antigen testing to the CDC or are not keeping complete data on it.
"There's a lot of confusion about what gets reported, when it gets reported and how it gets reported," Brownstein said. The main problem is a lack of efficient and effective infrastructure for centralized data collection, said Blythe Adamson, an epidemiologist and former member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force."Different states may have different ways they operationalize clinical reporting to different health departments. CDC does not have a standardized infrastructure for all of this.
The gap between the reported number and true number of COVID cases will only widen moving forward, as rapid antigen tests are rolled out by the millions.Antigen tests are being used more and more because they're fast and cheap. They can produce a result in just a few minutes because they don't need to be processed in a lab, whereas PCR and antibody tests may take days. Antigen tests also are significantly less expensive.
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