In reporting on covid-19, say 'newly discovered cases,' say experts, since testing still hasn't caught up to coronavirus

In writing about covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, health experts say journalists need to keep in mind that the shortage of testing means that the number of reported cases is below the actual number. Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic report: 

The testing situation is so bad that Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiology professor at Harvard, says that health officials and journalists should stop reporting the number of positive cases in the United States as “new cases.” Instead, he wrote by email, “they should refer to them as ‘newly discovered cases,’ in order to remove the impression that the number of cases reported has any bearing on the actual number.”

Madrigal writes in another story, "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s testing procedures missed the bulk of the cases. They focused exclusively on travelers, rather than testing more broadly, because that seemed like the best way to catch cases entering the country. Just days ago, it was not clear that the virus had spread solely from domestic contact at all. But then cases began popping up with no known international connection. What public-health experts call “community spread” had arrived," meaning that cases couldn't be traced to other cases.

Reports as of 4 p.m. Monday showed 570 cases in 36 states. "Experts say that number is almost certainly too small to reflect the full extent of the disease’s spread in the U.S.," Meyer and Madrigal report. "Not enough Americans have been tested for officials to know how many people are ill, they say. When researchers have used statistical and genetic techniques to estimate the true size of the outbreak, they have concluded that thousands of Americans may have already been infected by the beginning of the month."

Now that testing is becoming more available, "the number of cases will grow quickly," Madrigal writes. "Public-health officials are currently cautioning people not to worry as that happens, but it will be hard to disambiguate what proportion of the ballooning number of cases is the result of more testing and what proportion is from the actual spread of the virus."