Is the COVID19 NUMERATOR inaccurate?

[elburrito]

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there is a lot of news about shortage of testing to confirm SARS-CoV2 infection status. Serum Antibody testing is often undersensitive but relatively more specific. But what if deaths are not even being properly recorded or reported? This would under-represent the numerator in the case fatality or infection mortality rates.

Spike in US deaths and cases flagged as pneumonia suggests even greater COVID-19 impact

An analysis of CDC data suggests that COVID-19's death toll in the U.S. has been much worse than reported. Pneumonia cases are a clue as to why.

www.usatoday.com

 

[gbwillner]

there is a lot of news about shortage of testing to confirm SARS-CoV2 infection status. Serum Antibody testing is often undersensitive but relatively more specific. But what if deaths are not even being properly recorded or reported? This would under-represent the numerator in the case fatality or infection mortality rates.

Spike in US deaths and cases flagged as pneumonia suggests even greater COVID-19 impact

An analysis of CDC data suggests that COVID-19's death toll in the U.S. has been much worse than reported. Pneumonia cases are a clue as to why.

www.usatoday.com

Yup, there is a lot of new population-wide data that have come out this past week showing that total deaths are significantly more than previous months and years, beyond what has been proven to be related to COVID-19, and it conceivable that the delta is also due to COVID-19 and underreporting.

 

[elburrito]

I had hoped that the emerging data indicating high seroprevalence of IgG among asymptomatic patients might indicate that the true infection mortality rate is significantly lower than the case fatality rates of several percent (which were derived from RT-PCR on symptomatic patients only). However, Statistics 101, PPV correlates with prevalence. Is it possible that the seroprevalence based denominator increase may be contaminated by false positives?

 

[elburrito]

Antibody tests for Covid-19 wrong up to half the time, CDC says | CNN

Antibody tests used to determine if people have been infected in the past with Covid-19 might be wrong up to half the time, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in new guidance posted on its website.

www.cnn.com