As At-Home Tests Surge, Doubts Rise About Accuracy of Public Covid Counts
The New York Times
Most of the results of rapid tests are not reported. That’s magnifying questions about how best to measure the spread of the virus.
Millions of rapid at-home Covid tests are flying off pharmacy shelves across the country, giving Americans an instant, if sometimes imperfect, read on whether they are infected with the coronavirus.
But the results are rarely reported to public health departments, exacerbating the longstanding challenges of maintaining an accurate count of cases at a time when the number of infections is surging because of the Omicron variant.
At the minimum, the widespread availability of at-home tests is wreaking havoc with the accuracy of official positivity rates and case counts. At the other extreme, it is one factor making some public health experts raise a question that once would have been unthinkable: Do counts of coronavirus cases serve a useful purpose, and if not, should they be continued?
