Previously submitted to: JMIRx Med (no longer under consideration since Sep 30, 2021)
Date Submitted: Mar 15, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Does COVID-19 Testing Create More Cases? An Empirical Evidence on the Importance of Mass Testing During a Pandemic
Background:
The importance of testing and surveillance of an infectious disease cannot be underestimated. Testing is the first step to detect an infectious disease, and massive testing can slow or mitigate the spread of an infectious disease. Despite overwhelming evidence and the importance of testing discussed in the literature, there have been claims that "more COVID-19 testing creates more cases". Therefore, there is a need to present empirical evidence showing the importance of testing and whether or not it helps to minimize and contain the spread of the virus.
Objective:
In this research, we used a dataset from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services and empirically showed that by increasing the COVID-19 testing in the U.S., the spread of the COVID-19 decreased significantly.
Methods:
We used the empirical method of fixed-effect multiple linear regression to observe the effect of COVID-19 testing on the future number of positive cases.
Results:
Our results indicate a significant negative relationship between the number of positive cases and the number of tests performed in the past months. On average, a 1% increase in the number of COVID-19 tests performed in the last month yields 0.606% fewer positive cases in the subsequent month within a US state.
Conclusions:
Large-scale testing helps in identifying positive and asymptomatic cases early in the course of illness, which enabled individuals to isolate themselves, thus reducing the chances of spreading the diseases and slowing the spread of the pandemic.
Citation
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