The US has conducted more CoV2 tests per capita than any other large country. We test people without symptoms, students entering school, workers returning to their jobs, etc. The more you test, the more you find - and we find more cases than other countries. 1/

It's also now widely reported that the most common test is improperly calibrated. It's much too sensitive & finds trace amounts of inactive virus in people who stopped being infectious weeks ago. Consequently, we over-count positives by as much as 10X. 2/

Then, we have false positives caused by contamination or human error. FP rates are ~2% of tests conducted. This isn't a big problem when we test small numbers or only those with symptoms, but at 600K/day, 10K-15K or more are probably false positives. 3/ https://twitter.com/tlowdon/status/1306607868934721538?s=20

It's easy to see how case counts could get inflated, right? But, wait. There's more.

Struggling hospitals are incentivized via the CARES Act to designate as many patients as "CoV2+" as they can. There's an additional reimbursement for each C19 patient treated. Plus, there's a bonus pool of up to $77K/patient for those hospitals that have high numbers of them. 5/

Finally, we count any death associated with COVID-19 as "from" the disease, regardless of whether it was the actual cause or merely detected or suspected in someone within the prior 1-2 months. 6/

So, maintain some perspective. In the US, we overstate COVID-19 cases & deaths. It is certainly a serious disease, but a smaller public health issue than reported case & death figures would suggest.