The surge in testing may not produce much. The news yesterday was that over 300,000 tests have been performed in the U.S., most over the last week, but no state is showing an unexpected surge in cases. In fact NY is starting to look like the quarantine is working. Most likely good epidemiology will test the right people without a lot of extra tests. Epidemiological methods have worked long before tests were available. Not much information is available about the test. But it also may be that it would be better to test a contact after the incubation period as there may not be many virus particles in secretions until the virus causes cells to break down and release the new virus particles.

It may also be the way they are curating the data. Since it is cumulative, if they cannot find any report by the state of negative results, they may just be taking the last number. For Maryland it looks like the cumulative negatives have been stuck at 94 for quite a while. By now there are so many tests being done, that they may not be getting good numbers on the negatives.

I played around a little with the state by state data yesterday using the positives, which seem to tracking with other data sets well. You might be interested in the attached notebook. The graphic in it is explained in this post: Predicting Coronavirus Epidemic United States They are updating the data early each day so you can get up to date results, without waiting until the next day..

Attachments:

COVIDTrackingDailyData.nb

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