A drop in the number of daily COVID-19 tests in the United States in August is placing into question the accuracy of data showing a steady decline in the total number of new daily cases nationwide.
New COVID-19 cases in the U.S. stood 48,700 on Friday, which made this day the seventh straight day where the daily total was below 50,000. Cases dropped further to 43,000 on Saturday. New cases have fallen nearly 17% compared to last week, based on a seven-day average ending Friday.
The lower count is a marked improvement from the first week of July when daily cases in the U.S. hit a high of 60,000 on two consecutive days. At this time, more than a third of states reported record highs in daily new cases, according to the seven-day moving average.
The drop in total new cases per day in the five weeks since is welcome news, but some of the gleam is being tarnished by an inexplicable plunge in the number of daily tests. The reduction in testing is hampering effective response to new outbreaks fueling the steady spread of the disease.
"I really have come to believe we have entered a real, new, emerging crisis with testing and it is making it hard to know where the pandemic is slowing down and where it's not," said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.
Dr. Jha said the drop in testing is quite concerning because testing is the first fundamental step to figuring out how much disease exists in a community. He said if doctors can't test people, they don't really know how much disease there is and how much disease that's not being detected.
As to why the drop, Dr. Jha thinks people might not want to be tested given the unduly long delays -- sometimes as long as two weeks -- in receiving their test results. Or, the drop might be due to delays in reporting.
Tests have been declining since the start of August, according to public health experts. The average number of coronavirus tests across the U.S. came to 793,000 in the last two weeks of July. On the other hand, test numbers dropped to fewer than 650,000 a day during the first 12 days of August, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project.
