As most folks know by now, there's two kinds of Covid tests. One of them tests for whether you have the disease now. The other tests for the presence of antibodies in your blood, indicating that you have had the disease at some point. You might think that an outfit like, say, the CDC, would distinguish between them in its count of Covid-19 testing. Alas, you'd be wrong, as The Atlantic reported today. Why would the CDC (and Georgia, Texas, and some other states) do this? Well, it lets you (a) claim to be doing a lot more testing for current infections than you currently are (because the addition of antibody tests to the viral tests drives up the total number of "tests"), and (b) will drive down the percentage of positive test results (because a small number of people have the antibodies, generally a much smaller number than test positive in most places in the U.S., especially those that conduct relatively few viral tests).
And if you do massive numbers of tests with low percent positive, then those annoying scientists say you can reopen sooner! It puts you on the good green side of charts like the one above (source), not the bad yellow one.
Trump has been in office too long not to assume that this is the work of Trumpian political operatives and not CDC scientists, at least until proven otherwise. Trump himself is obviously too stupid and incurious to know the difference between the testing types, but like Henry II, he makes it clear enough what he would like to see happen. And that's lots of tests, lots of opening, and lots of loyal servants who translate his impulses into "reality."
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