1) Avg age of infected is 36-37 now instead of 60+ as in April, so there is a lower death rate (plus, infections today will only translate into deaths in three weeks or so)
2) Test positivity rate is UP, so testing has gone up "a little" while cases have gone up a lot.
You're completely skipping over the positivity rate; many countries are testing a heck of a lot more than the US is; and they're showing positivity rates in the 1-5% range.
If your hypothesis is correct, and infection rate is going up just because of more testing, then we should be pacing with other countries that are also testing more. We're seeing positivity rates of almost 25% in Arizona and 19% in Florida and Texas; which way out strips countries that have this more under control. At that rate of 15% or more, how many people are being missed (or are you also assuming we're catching 100% of all cases)? The more likely interpretation of the data is that not only are we testing more, but there are more cases; which fits with the overall data trend of BOTH more tests AND more infections.
I'm going to nip your goalpost moving in the bud here - since I'm sure you'll come back with "yeah, but deaths are going down."
Just because mortality has been going down doesn't mean that it isn't affecting the younger group and they're just magically recovering back to baseline. There's good evidence that there are lasting lung and immune response issues post "recovery" if it doesn't kill you. Further, deaths are a lagging indicator, and unfortunately what timeframe on that is unknown now because the age group is skewing younger and a large portion of our dataset is skewed towards the 65+ group due to how the initial wave of the disease spread.
Younger people aren't locked down and are more likely to be social ATM. Since they are more likely to carry without showing symptoms, test positivity going up makes some sense, it is plausible at least.
No. Stop spreading disinformation and inform yourself.
It’s pretty easy to compute normalized infection rates for populations based on samples of data, which haven’t changed materially with the testing ramp up.
Additionally, antibody testing allows for an assessment of past infection rates at a community level.
By your own source, test positivity is up over the last 4 weeks.
> Now we have more tests than we know what to do with
A coworker related about a month ago that when his wife, who works in a hospital and showed some symptoms of covid-19, asked to be tested, she was told that the nearest place with available tests was a 2.5 hour drive away.
1) Avg age of infected is 36-37 now instead of 60+ as in April, so there is a lower death rate (plus, infections today will only translate into deaths in three weeks or so)
2) Test positivity rate is UP, so testing has gone up "a little" while cases have gone up a lot.