COVID-19 Data Blindness — Malice or Stupidity?

As California public health officials have been learning how to adapt to the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic, the metrics to watch have been a shifting target. In April, Governor Newsom announced a set of indicators to watch to gauge when contagion mitigation measures should be loosened or tightened. One of the key indicators to watch concerned surveillance testing, “ability to monitor and protect our communities through testing…” The goal of maintaining a daily testing rate threshold per capita made a great deal of sense; we don’t know how pervasive the infection is if the population isn’t getting tested. While President Trump’s sycophants are often quick to refer to his most outlandish statements as “joking” or “sarcasm” (just what we want from a Commander In Chief) he insisted he wasn’t joking (“I don’t kid”) when he implored that we “slow down the testing.” While Trump has been fixated on his preference for data blindness, “if we tested half as much, those numbers would be down”, I think most of us would rather have a realistic assessment of where our hazards are.

However, California just shifted to a different set of criteria based on risk tiers. This new criteria does not include the surveillance test coverage rate. This is an erroneous omission. I’ll use the county where I live (Contra Costa) as an illustration, here’s the new cases per day over the prior month:

Looks like a great trend! Here’s the number of new cases per capita since March:

Yay! Things are heading in the right direction! And look at the positivity rate in the same time period:

This is cause for celebration, amirite? But wait, our surveillance testing has plummeted from a month ago:

So of course the number of cases are going down, the testing rates are going down. We haven’t seen the Newsom administration express the same fetish for ignorance that the Trump administration has.

However one must wonder: is this an omission of malice, as the president’s overt willful ignorance has demonstrated, or is it stupidity, as the absence of an overt preference for ignorance from the governor suggests?

Thanks to Daily Kos for the cartoon.