TAMPA, Fla. — Tracking COVID-19 cases is becoming more of a challenge for public health officials.
“What’s happening in a lot of cases is people are home testing,” said Dr. Jill Roberts, Associate Professor for the USF College of Public Health.
If someone does get a positive test result, they’re most often not reporting it.
“You can definitely figure whatever it is you’re seeing for the community percent positivity, it’s truly higher than what you’re seeing,” said Dr. Laura Arline, Chief Quality Officer for BayCare.
Experts said the numbers we do get are mostly from people who tested positive at the hospital or a doctor’s office, which isn’t giving an accurate representation of how much the virus is actually circulating in the community.
“So we have really no idea from the case reports that are coming out, the testing reports those numbers are probably wildly underestimating. Probably by a factor of like 10-fold or something like that,” said public health expert Dr. Thomas Unnasch.
This is problematic because, without the real numbers, health officials can’t really know what’s going on with the pandemic.
It’s a growing concern for researchers as they closely monitor the rapidly spreading new omicron subvariant, XBB.1.5.
It now makes up 40.5% of new infections, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Unfortunately, all indication is that we’re heading towards another wave of COVID for sure,” said Roberts.
Omicron’s offshoots continue to dominate globally, with this recent mutation putting health officials on high alert.
However, the lack of accurate data on cases right now is making it much harder to track their true impacts.
“If we don’t have an estimate of how many people are actually getting infected versus the number that are getting sick enough to show up in the hospital, then it’s really hard to tell whether these new variants that are out there that are circulating, are better or worse, milder or more severe, than the ones that were circulating previously,” said Unnasch.
