[joglynne]

JUN 23 20204:12 PM

Trump blames rise in coronavirus cases on increased testing, despite evidence of more spread

snippet :- “Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more than any other country, and ever expanding,” Trump tweeted Tuesday. “With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!”

However, public health specialists have repeatedly said the data does not indicate that increased testing accounts for the recent surge in daily new cases. To dispel claims that testing is to blame for the country’s growing outbreak, epidemiologists point to a figure known as the positivity rate, which indicates the percent of tests that come back positive in a given region.

snip

That States are finding more cases relative to the amount of tests they are conducting provides the strongest rebuttal to the administration’s assertion that case numbers are rising because we’re getting better at finding cases through increased testing,” Jennifer Nuzzo, lead epidemiologist of Johns Hopkins University’s Covid-19 Testing Insights Initiative, wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post. “They tell us the opposite — that each of these states needs to do even more testing to find infections — followed by more rigorous contact tracing and isolation.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/23/trum...of-spread.html