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Nobody Has a Clue How Many People Have COVID-19
Local data simply isn’t available, while state and national totals woefully underreport the reality
Across the United States, an unknown but presumably large number of people are packing COVID-19 around without knowing it, while only the most severely ill typically even get tested. As for knowing whether someone in your town or community might have the disease, well, fuhgettaboutit it.
A mish-mash of local and state reporting protocols, an utterly insufficient testing capacity, and the multi-day wait for results have conspired to render the total case count woefully lower than reality, while offering no insight to the public into what might be happening in outlying communities, small towns or even large cities.
Just one example: As the relatively modest but rapidly growing number of diagnosed COVID-19 cases in Arizona rises, residents of Anthem, an unincorporated community of about 25,000 people straddling the City of Phoenix and Maricopa County, have wondered how many of their neighbors might be infected.
“It would be helpful to breakdown the # of cases per zip code!” Marisha Dowdell wrote on the North Phoenix News Facebook page. “We have the right to know exactly where this virus is!!”
