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Health

US likely undercounting new COVID-19 cases fueled by delta variant, Gottlieb says

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Former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on Sunday that the U.S. is likely undercounting the number of COVID-19 cases because some infected younger and healthier people are experiencing mild symptoms and may not think to get tested.

“I think at this point we’re probably undercounting how many infections there are in the states right now because to the extent that a lot of the infections are occurring in younger and healthier people who might be getting mild illness, they’re … probably not presenting to get tested,” Gottlieb told host John Dickerson on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” 

“And to extent that there are some breakthrough cases, either asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic cases in those who’ve been vaccinated, they’re not presenting to get tested because if you’ve been vaccinated don’t think that you have the coronavirus even if you develop a mild illness, and we’re not doing a lot of routine screening right now unless you work for the New York Yankees, you’re not getting tested on a regular basis,” he added.

Gottlieb’s comments come as the U.S. is seeing an increase in COVID-19 cases driven by the highly contagious delta variant.

Vaccination rates are also flat, as some members of the vaccine-hesitant community remain opposed to getting inoculated. Unvaccinated individuals make up the majority of the recent COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths.

Gottlieb said on Sunday he thinks the delta wave “could be far more advanced than what we’re detecting right now.”

“At the peak of the epidemic in the wintertime we were probably turning over 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 infections. In the summer wave of last summer we were probably picking up more like 1 in 10 infections. We might be picking up something on the order of 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 infections right now because more of those infections are occurring in people who either won’t present for testing or they’re mild infections and they’re self-limiting,” Gottlieb said.

“So the people who tend to be getting tested right now are people who are getting very sick or people who are developing telltale symptoms of COVID like loss of taste or smell, and that’s only about 15 or 20 percent of people who have become infected,” he added.

Anthony FauciAnthony FauciHillicon Valley: Biden: Social media platforms ‘killing people’ | Tech executives increased political donations amid lobbying push | Top House antitrust Republican forms ‘Freedom from Big Tech Caucus’ Harris in Instagram post with Olivia Rodrigo: Vaccines are ‘Good 4 U’ Jen Psaki to throw out first pitch at Nationals game MORE, President BidenJoe BidenBiden calls on Congress to pass voting rights bills on anniversary of John Lewis’s death Afghan, Taliban officials meet in Qatar amid US troop withdrawal Biden administration investigating cases of ‘Havana syndrome’ in Austria MORE’s chief medical adviser, made a similar statement in May, telling NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he thinks there is “no doubt” that the U.S. has been undercounting COVID-19 cases.



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Science

U.S. Cities Are Vastly Undercounting Emissions, Researchers Find

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Dr. Gurney said that the errors seemed to be simple miscalculations. “I don’t think there’s any attempt to systematically or intentionally underestimate emissions,” he said. Although some cities correctly estimated their emissions, he noted, though “whether that’s right for the right reasons or right for the wrong reasons, it’s difficult to know.”

Dr. Gurney’s work receives funding from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and one of the authors, Kimberly Mueller, is a scientist there. James R. Whetstone, an official in the institute’s greenhouse gas measurement program, called the new paper “an important step forward” in properly measuring greenhouse gases from cities. “What will serve the nation best is if we have a consistent way to state emissions that goes from the city level to the national level,” he said.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, he noted, focuses much of its efforts on atmospheric monitoring, and so Dr. Gurney’s method can help “to measure the same thing in different ways,” and thus gain confidence in the results.

Earlier studies by researchers at the University of Michigan, Harvard and the federal government found that emissions of methane, another powerful greenhouse gas, were also undercounted by many cities. Dr. Gurney said that “both gasses should really be part of this systematic approach.”

The cities’ efforts so far, Dr. Gurney said, have been a laudable endeavor, but “they haven’t had a lot of tools to do it.” What’s more, he said, “Cities are struggling to pick up the garbage and fill potholes, much less keep detailed reports about their emissions.”

Reducing emissions in a city, he said, requires a deep understanding of where the biggest problems are, including specific traffic-choked highways and industries, so that the authorities can take focused actions that provide the greatest benefit at the lowest cost. Putting in high-occupancy vehicle lanes or rapid bus lanes on every highway could be wasteful; it would be better, he said, to know which road projects could do the most good.

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