Why more testing hasn’t led to more Covid-19 cases & new initiative for dementia care

Trump said #Covid-19 testing ’creates more cases.’ We did the math - STAT
▻https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/20/trump-said-more-covid19-testing-creates-more-cases-we-did-the-math

In fact, Florida has seen a sevenfold increase in cases in the past month, said Youyang Gu, who developed a well-respected, machine-learning-based model of Covid-19 whose projections have been quite accurate. “In the same time span, the number of tests only increased by a factor of two,” he said. “Obviously, if you double the testing but the number of cases increased sevenfold, then the virus is clearly spreading.”

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In all, 26 states that did more testing in July than in May found more cases because Covid-19 was more prevalent. In 15 of them, the number of cases per 1,000 people tested had more than doubled.

Seven states (Colorado, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin) meet the three criteria needed to support Trump’s claim that we’re seeing more cases only, or mostly, because we’re doing more testing. The criteria are doing more tests in July than in May, finding more cases on a typical day in July than May, but seeing the number of cases per 1,000 tests decline or remain unchanged from May to July.

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New York tells the opposite story: more testing found fewer cases. The state nearly doubled its daily tests from May 13 (33,794) to July 12 (62,418). But its cases fell from 2,176 to 557. If the case rate had not dropped (by 86 %), New York’s expanded testing would have found 3,995 cases on July 12.

In fact, 16 states plus the District of Columbia are like New York. They tested much more, but found fewer cases in July than May — in most, not only “fewer” in the sense of fewer cases per 1,000 but fewer in absolute terms. New Jersey reported 10,246 tests and 1,144 cases on May 14, and 20,846 tests with a mere 393 new cases on July 14. Again, the virus hasn’t disappeared, but the expansion of testing, far from “creating” cases, has brought good news: In these states, it’s much less prevalent than it was two months ago.