60% undercounted: lack of transparency in US COVID-19

A pedestrian walks past a memorial installation for those who died of COVID-19 outside Green-Wood Cemetery in New York, the United States, on June 14, 2021. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)

Despite the countless warnings given by Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor and the nation’s top infectious disease expert, to the U.S. government and public on the necessity of vaccinations and mask mandates, the numbers of COVID-19 patients in the U.S. hospitals continue to mount. There are more than 60,000 new cases a day, “the highest level since April”, says the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to Financial Times on Aug 2, 2021.

CDC says the Delta strain “accounts for more than 80 percent of those cases”, and suggests that people in public spaces still need to wear masks despite being fully vaccinated.

The Delta variant should take most of the blame for the resurgence of the pandemic in the U.S., threatening the efforts and sacrifices some have already made in order for the nation to “go back to normal”, after the long period of suffering that everyone’s been through. But there is one striking fact that has emerged from the newly conducted study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) - the total number of U.S. cases may be “twice as high” as previous estimates, The Hill reported on July 28,2021.

"Our results indicate that a large majority of COVID-19 infections go unreported," the report’s authors indicate, "This suggests that continued mitigation and an aggressive vaccination effort are necessary to surpass the herd-immunity threshold without incurring many more deaths due to the disease."

PNAS’s study also explained that the model used by scientists in the U.S. CDC is a multiplier model, which bases its estimates on nationally reported laboratory-confirmed cases, but do not represent the population adequately.

"It's very hard to get public health messaging right," said Brett Giroir, former assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in an interview with Fox News, “They (CDC) made the recommendation (of mask-wearing) without being transparent about the data. If you told the American people the data, which they obviously have, then we can have an intelligent discussion. But they haven't done that."

The lack of vaccinations and mask-wearing has led to what Fauci said would be the consequences of ignoring the warnings - “more pain and suffering” for the United States. For the government, however, data transparency should always be the priority in order for the public to have a clear eye on the ACTUAL situation they are going through, which is, in this case, a likely undercounted 60% of COVID-19 cases in the U.S., according to The Guardian on July 26, 2021.

“With the Delta variant surging and mask mandates being reinstated, it's up to the White House to lead on the transparency issue. And they simply aren't doing it,” said CNN editor Chris Cillizza in his article on July 21, 2021.

As the CDC advises fully vaccinated people to wear masks in public spaces to halt the transmission of the contagious Delta variant, it is the U.S. government’s duty to reconsider how to achieve data transparency in order to convince the public to follow such scientific advice, to educate them that they cannot underestimate the situation by fully placing their hopes on time.

"Reliable estimates of population prevalence are necessary for understanding the spread of the virus and the effectiveness of mitigation strategies," the authors note on PNAS’s public research. By publicizing how many infections there actually are even after vaccination is in place and how many more cases have been undercounted against previous measures, data transparency will play a more convincing role than any other vaccination or mask-wearing campaign in terms of earning public trust and compliance amongst U.S. society.