by Alexis C. Madrigal and Robinson Meyer
The government’s disease-fighting agency is conflating viral and
antibody tests, compromising a few crucial metrics that governors depend
on to reopen their economies. Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, and other
states are doing the same.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is conflating the results
of two different types of coronavirus tests, distorting several
important metrics and providing the country with an inaccurate picture
of the state of the pandemic. We’ve learned that the CDC is making, at
best, a debilitating mistake: combining test results that diagnose
current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether
someone has ever had the virus. The upshot is that the government’s
disease-fighting agency is overstating the country’s ability to test
people who are sick with COVID-19. The agency confirmed to The Atlantic
on Wednesday that it is mixing the results of viral and antibody tests,
even though the two tests reveal different information and are used for
different reasons.