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!!”
That information is not being distributed.
“Public Health does not report this data at the city level,” Fields Moseley, director of communications for Maricopa County, told me. “That is not an effective way to track and respond to disease when there is community spread [meaning people are getting it from other people in counties across the state]. It can give a false sense of safety or a false sense of danger. Everyone should assume they can come in contact with COVID-19 at this time and take precautions as outlined by ADHS,” he said, referring to the Arizona Department of Health Services.
The situation is similar nationwide, and even county-by-county data is hard to come by in many states.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency you might expect to be the clearinghouse for COVID-19 case data, updates its stats just five times a week and includes only state-level data.
