Right now, we live in a scary world. And media doesn’t really help, showing us plenty of numbers so they can induce fear. It’s the same old story. But that’s not all.
Officials have been using scary numbers to show the impact of COVID-19 on the world. They used a number of hospitalizations or deaths, making people more aware of the situation. But this one doesn’t really help scientists when it comes to an understanding if immunity can be reached with the vaccines.
Two scientists from the University of Washington have made a statistical framework with the most essential data of this pandemic – the number of cases and deaths, that actually show the actual incidence of COVID-19 in the USA. Their framework shows that 60% of COVID-19 cases were undetected in March.
This is very helpful, as it can help officials learn about the actual problem of the disease – both undiagnosed and diagnoses and the direct resources needed.
Adrian Raftery, senior author, stated, “There are all sorts of different data sources we can draw on to understand the COVID-19 pandemic — the number of hospitalizations in a state, or the number of tests that come back positive. But each source of data has its own flaws that would give a biased picture of what’s really going on. What we wanted to do is to develop a framework that corrects the flaws in multiple data sources and draws on their strengths to give us an idea of COVID-19’s prevalence in a region, a state or the country as a whole.”
Of course, different sources cannot always tell the truth. One COVID-19 statistic showed the test results that came back positive from a certain region, but that cannot be considered to be generally true. It depends on the region, the willingness of people to get tested, and if they even get access to the tests. We can’t really get a clear picture of the prevalence of the virus.
