Results of online nonprobability surveys suggest that “54 million U.S. COVID-19 went uncounted in official records after home tests were widely deployed and institutional testing waned starting in February 2022.” CIDRAP has the news.
Up to that point, “the percentage of adults reporting a positive COVID-19 at-home test was similar to results for institutional testing and wastewater monitoring.” The Northeastern University-led research team that led the surveys suggests that these surveys can “complement institutional and wastewater testing in an emerging pandemic and provide estimates of uncounted infections when rapid at-home tests are broadly available and institutional testing phases out.”
The researchers surveyed 306,799 adults across the U.S. 17 times from June 2020 to January 2023, and then compared “survey-weighted estimates of monthly confirmed COVID-19 infections from January 2020 to January 2023 and uncounted test-confirmed cases from February 2022 to January 2023 with institutional COVID-19 infection data from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and wastewater viral concentrations from Biobot Analytics.”
From April 2020 to January 2022, “before the government broadly deployed home tests, national survey-weighted confirmed COVID-19 case estimates were strongly correlated with institutional COVID-19 infection reports.” After that point, however, “the correlation was weak and no longer statistically significant, but survey COVID-19 case estimates correlated strongly with viral concentrations in wastewater before and after this time point.”
Survey estimates suggest that “approximately 79% million…confirmed cases may have occurred compared with 25 million reported in the JHU data.”
