Florida’s 1 million COVID-19 cases: What do they really mean?
The news sounded cataclysmic: Florida this week passed the threshold of 1 million people infected with COVID-19.
Overlooked was the fact that most of those people now feel fine. Or that seven times as many people have tested negative for the coronavirus since the pandemic began.
Still, day after day, state health officials trumpet the total of number of cases over the past eight months, painting the gigantic number atop their online report. Headlines follow.
The grand total gives a false indication of the pandemic’s presence in the community, epidemiologists say. And paying attention to it, without the right context, is misleading and politically polarizing.
Liberals point to the total cases as an indication that Florida’s pandemic is far worse than those in most states. Only Texas and California, the biggest states in the country, have reported as many cases until now.
Conservatives criticize almost any talk of coronavirus as fear-mongering about nothing — a “hoax.”
Both extremes are wrong.
Here’s the truth about Florida’s much-ballyhooed 1 million milestone: Monitoring the total number of cases is valuable to the extent that it focuses attention on how many lives the pandemic has touched — about 5% of Florida’s 21 million residents. But ultimately it is of little use to judge how widespread the pandemic is on any given day.
Epidemiologists and public health experts don’t put much stock in the number. “Standing alone, it can be distracting if not misinforming,” said Jay Wolfson, a professor of public health at the University of South Florida.
Instead, scientist look at a tangle of other data to get a read on the extent of the pandemic: positivity rates, frequency of testing, trends in new cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
What they don’t see — what virtually no one calculates — is how many people are sick at a given time.
That calculation would be too difficult, time consuming and expensive, said Mary Jo Trepka, professor of epidemiology at Florida International University. “You’d have to go through an entire city, take a sample of those people, and find out how many are positive at any given time,” she said.
Johns Hopkins University does publish a count of “active” cases, but the number for Florida — 989,487 — clearly is wrong. Researchers are reevaluting their methodology, complicated by the disparate ways states report their information.
Trepka advises people to take stock of the total number of cases as well as trends in new cases, deaths, hospitalizations and positivity rates (the percentage of COVID-19 tests that come back positive). “You want to stick with something as concrete as possible,” she said.
She compared the approach to watching an iceberg float in the ocean. “We’re able to see the tip there,” she said. “But we understand that there is stuff under the water, too. We just can’t see it.”
Andrew Boryga can be reached at 954-356-4533 or aboryga@sunsentinel.com. Follow on Twitter @borywrites.
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