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Comment by deng | Hacker News Reader

According to

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

the NY numbers have more than doubled today (from ~10k to ~22k). What is happening? Are some belated test results coming in?

EDIT: Numbers were just corrected, are now at total ~16k with ~5k new cases. Still high growth, but more reasonable.

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New York is now testing more daily per-capita than South Korea and China, so naturally due to the higher test rate (which gives ability to find the clusters) New York is going to pull ahead of the rest of the country because it will have the ability to actually show the cases that are active but weren't able to be tested.

They started testing in mass the last couple of days, so you see the spike...

I think generally the case numbers reflect more how much testing is being made in the country than how many people are infected. I think I got infected, called a relative of mine who is a doctor and followed UK guidelines which is to self isolate. So I appear in no statistics whatsoever. As the vast majority of people with none or mild symptoms. I think you can pretty much ditch the official case numbers as meaningless.

In Massachusetts we were told the numbers would go up quickly because there were a lot of results backlogged at the CDC.

I wish I knew where the official numbers were coming from. For a while we’d hear about “presumptive positive” cases, where a person had tested positive according to a state test, but it wouldn’t be counted until confirmed by the CDC. I don’t know if that’s still the case.

New York state has been increasing testing pretty rapidly. A few days ago they were at 10,000 a day.

I think there was a typo. Earlier this day, NY had +5k. Then it went to +12,345 (which looked like a suspicious number to me). And now, the number is back to +5,429.

It's still growing fast though.

The numbers seem to update in a weird staggered way; for example right now for New York I see 15801 + 5429, which is right about the +33% the US has been seeing since Mar 1.

There is a lot of noise in the data but the general trend is more than clear.

It's a reflection of improved testing, but it is also an indicator of how bad things really are. The reason for the huge jump is that the virus has been spreading unchecked and undetected for much too long.

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