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Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

It seems like this could apply to pretty much every effected country.

We know the US has drastically under tested which again results in under reporting.

I believe it applies in France - the official mortality statistics reported each evening by the Director General of Health relate to deaths in hospitals, not outside of hospitals such as in nursing homes. While the Director General is clear and transparent about what his statistics represent, the headline figure is generally reported as the death toll each evening…and it is not until the news stories the next day that we’re reminded of the 20 people who died in this nursing home, another 7 who died in this nursing home, and another where the proportion of people suffering from the impact of the virus is even higher.

EDIT: Le Monde has a story up about this. They describe the nursing homes in France as a ‘grey zone’ in terms of the death toll right now - everyone knows there are deaths but they are not included in the official figures yet. The article meantions nursing homes in three regions of France that have had, between them, nearly 1000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 so far. None of these deaths are so far counted in the 4000 ‘official deaths’ reported each evening. The article also notes that there are 7400 nursing homes in France, a number that rises to 10,000 if you count similar structures (hospices, for example). Scary times.

https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2020/04/01/coronaviru...

Had under tested, the rate of testing has increased drastically in the last two weeks. It’s not where we need it to be, but the US is now testing at a rate comparable with any other country.

Can you provide a source (other than the president) that backs that up?

The US is doing a minimum of ~100,000 tests per day currently (1.2 million total tests at a minimum thus far), although that doesn't capture every private test that is performed. That's double the per capita per day test rate that Britain is functioning at currently and it's also far off the rate that Germany is testing at (the US needs to increase its rate by 2x to 2.5x or so to match Germany) on the excellent testing side of things. Right now it's more fair to say the US would probably fall in the middle of Western Europe on the testing rate.

The reason Britain has an extreme 8% mortality rate on its positive cases, is because they aren't testing properly (and haven't been). They'd already be at 100,000+ cases if they were testing just at the rate the US is. France as another example has such an extreme case mortality rate (7%) in part because they're not testing enough people. Their positive result would be far higher than ~60k right now if they were (and that mortality rate would drop considerably).

One of the reasons Germany's mortality rate is so low, is they're catching a very large number of all positive cases via massive testing. If the US were testing at the rate of Germany, its case mortality rate (which is around 2.3%) would drop by more than 1/2.

This site has done a very good job at bringing together all the available testing data across the states.

https://covidtracking.com/data/us-daily

It is a very sad state of affairs that a Presidential statements cannot considered reliable anymore.

Random lies don't Presidential statements make.

In NYC, no one is tested unless they require hospitalization.

> If your symptoms are mild, you should stay at home and monitor your condition. Testing is only offered to patients who are severely ill and need hospitalization.

https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-03288

Testing latency is still 10 days in most areas, so the results are out of date.

This will change quickly, take a look at the Abbott RealTime SARS-COV-2 test

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