WASHINGTON — As it tracks the coronavirus’s spread, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is combining tests that detect active infection with those that detect recovery from COVID-19 — a system that muddies the picture of the pandemic but raises the percentage of Americans tested as President Donald Trump boasts about testing.

“It just doesn’t make any sense; all of us are really baffled,” said Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida.
Epidemiologists, state health officials and a spokeswoman for the CDC said there was no ill intent; they attributed the flawed reporting system to confusion and fatigue in overworked state and local health departments that typically track infections — not tests — during outbreaks. The CDC relies on states to report their data.

If the agency intended to bolster the testing numbers for political purposes, the advantage to Trump would be minimal. The Atlantic reported that on Monday, one of the CDC’s trackers reported that 10.2 million viral tests had been conducted nationwide since the pandemic began. On Wednesday, after the CDC stopped differentiating virus tests, the number went to 10.8 million.

“This is not an intentional misuse of information — it’s part of the fog of the infectious disease war,” said Michael Osterholm, a University of Minnesota professor and former state epidemiologist who was sharply critical of the disease control centers early in the pandemic. “We’ve done surveillance for cases, and now we’re all trying to do testing, and it presents unique challenges.”

“What that means is that those tests are more likely to come back negative, which means that you could end up with a misleading picture overall,” he said. “You’ll think there is less disease there than there actually is. That is not something that is not going to be helpful, to say the least.”

https://ca.yahoo.com/news/cdc-test-counting-error-leaves-141242313.html