More Young People Are Testing Positive for COVID-19 in the U.S. Here’s What That Could Mean for the Outbreak
Testing likely plays a part in the shifting profile of COVID-19 patients. In the beginning of the outbreak, when tests were in short supply, only the sickest patients could get a test. Since many of the sickest patients are elderly, they were over-represented in the data early on. But now, with testing much easier to come by, public-health networks are able to capture more mild and asymptomatic cases, which includes many younger people who probably wouldn’t have gotten tested in March or April.
“The more testing we do, the closer we get to the truth,” says Natalie Dean, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida. “What we were doing before was skewed to the oldest ages.” Recent trends suggest infection rates are going up in the U.S. for all groups, including for younger people. If we were simply detecting more cases via more robust testing—as opposed to more infections actually occurring—Dean says she’d expect the overall percentage of tests that come back positive to go down, since more people who ultimately test negative would also be included in the data.
in current COVID-19 hotspots like Texas, Florida and Arizona, which suggests a change in the underlying outbreak. More people of all ages seem to be getting sick in these areas, and we now have enough tests to see it happening.The oldest patients are still theand become hospitalized from COVID-19, just as they’ve been throughout the outbreak.
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