Hospitalizations vs. case counts: What COVID-19 numbers matter most?
Epidemiologists know they never have a perfectly accurate picture of how a virus penetrates a community.
"With any infectious disease, we know that those cases that are reported are typically just the tip of the iceberg, right?" said communicable disease epidemiology supervisor Justin Frederick.
Now, with the federal government's at-home test kits arriving, the size of that iceberg is becoming even harder to gauge.
"Now when people get sick enough to come into the hospital, then that becomes real hard and fast data," Dr. Mark Rupp said.
Rupp said hospitalization numbers are the most reliable and telling data.
"When we have just declared crisis standards of care and say the hospitals are under stress, we're not just making that up," Rupp said. "We're still in a very dangerous time."
Epidemiologist Anne O'keefe hopes we can get to a place where we don't need to watch community transmission so closely. But she says we're not there yet.
"I think they're still really valuable to watch," O'Keefe said.
Even if case numbers are an underestimate, O'Keefe said, they show COVID-19 spreading through schools and hospitals.
"The tests that we do get, that's still COVID that's in the community, so you know that it's still very high," O’Keefe said.
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