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Comment by OG_BME | Hacker News Reader

I, and I imagine many others, immediately jumped to the conclusion that the data in question was more concrete, like confirmed cases or ICU counts. It goes to show how easily twists can be put on any story to serve a larger purpose

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the data in question was more concrete, like confirmed cases or ICU counts

There's been been accusations of government manipulation of perceived infection rates through under testing. More concrete data is arguably only an improvement if sufficient testing is being conducted.

But under testing has had the opposite effect of what you seem to be applying; it doesn't make the disease perceived as less dangerous, it makes the disease look much more severe by undercounting the mild cases.

Undertesting might make the severe cases look more dangerous, but the media focus right now is "flattening the curve". By under-reporting the number of active cases, politicians can push for earlier reopening.

The risk is that untested asymptomatic or presymptomatic cases can then exponentially spread back through the community.

I do wholeheartedly agree with a sibling comment that self-reported data should be clearly separated from actual confirmed cases.

I think the goal should be the most concrete data we have. A debate could be had on if self reporting or test data is more accurate. One factor to consider is if the self reporting data is being represented in a way commonly reserved for test data. Another factor to consider is that 33% of Americans think they may have had covid and 13% think they probably did [1]. This is grossly out of agreement with serology results.

https://www.businessinsider.com/small-percentage-americans-w...

In this case, the media was using the self reporting data to claim that Florida had Covid-19 cases as early as December (and it's this that Florida was supposedly firing her for refusing to cover up): https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article242480... Needless to say, people self-reporting Covid-19 symptoms that early is the most unreliable self-reporting data of all due to the low or maybe even zero number of genuine cases and the much larger prevalence of things like the flu. If I remember rightly, researchers have tried serology tests on people who thought they had it that early and found that basically none of them had.

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