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Comment by awb | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder how under-reported mild breakthrough cases are, due to self testing?

I bet Google & Facebook have enough metadata to measure it more accurately.

I personally know of a dozen or so unreported positives (both tested positive and presumed positive), compared to two reported positives.

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Lots of people are looking at local waste-water COVID testing data as a way to get prevalence in an area.

Here’s my local area - note the scale!

https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm

And the US CDC program for this national effort: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/surveillance/wastewater-sur...

Is it really important to report mild cases determined by self testing? Frankly if I have the sniffles due to a cold, allergies, or even covid…I simply don’t see why the government needs to know. If I am not utilizing health care resources and self isolating, its nobody’s damned business but my own.

It’s useful for virologists and policy makers to understand the transmission rate of COVID and its accompanying variants since it’s a novel virus.

If unreported cases are 10-50x reported cases, then the hospitalization and death rates become minuscule. And then it means we might actually be closer to natural herd immunity.

Point taken about balancing this with a right to privacy though and I think that’s why no one is seriously pushing for reporting at that level and why it is optional to report your at home test results. The use case of contact tracing is long gone.

But, there are many valid, non-authoritarian reasons for wanting data as granular as possible with a new virus.

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