Okay, we know this is wrong. I’ve said that before. But since he keeps saying this, let’s dig into why it’s wrong and what it means. (thread) https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1283183152047980545

First, let’s look at why it’s wrong. An important flaw of his logic is that it assumes that positivity rates for infections are constant across all levels of testing and throughout our country.

Therefore halving the tests then halves the number of positive cases. In that line of thinking, doubling testing doubles the number of positive cases.

In April, rate of positive tests in my state of NJ was around 50%. We were running fewer than 7k tests per day. We’ve completed almost triple that per day now, but the number of positives is much lower than in April.

Why? Because following recommendations from public health leaders brings down cases, not tests. If you have a rodent problem, you don’t solve it by turning the lights out. You solve it by finding out where the mice are coming from and sealing those areas off.

His obsession only with the total number of positive cases misses three major benefits of testing: to provide proper care to those that test positive, to see where the surges are, and to ensure we try to isolate/treat those infected and contact trace.

So what about the claim that we’re testing more than before? Yes, that’s the case. But in too many places across the country, it takes a week or more to get those test results. At that point, those tests don’t have the impact they would if you got results within 24 hours.

If you’re forced to wait a week to get results, it makes contact tracing harder, which makes containment harder.

Testing is a tool. The goal isn’t to test – the goal is to get data so you can act on it. Right now, we’re failing to act because we’re not taking the data we need to act seriously.

So how do we fix this? We need more testing, we need guarantees that results are processed rapidly, we need to be able to surge testing capacities to hotspots as we see spikes, and we need to follow up with major investments in tracing and isolating.

I hope the President gets this right, because we can’t afford for him to be wrong. We’ve already lost too many of our fellow Americans to double down a false strategy that clearly doesn’t work. Every day is a chance to reverse that. Let’s make it happen. (end)