I wonder if what's going on in Massachusetts is that it's actually been testing.

[LAS14]

I've been watching as Massachusetts is stuck at the 3rd most cases in the country, after much larger NY and NJ. Their hospitals haven't been overwhelmed. With their prestigious medical establishment, maybe they had connections to get tests???? The article below, along with a number of other reports I've read all agree that the state has done a good job with mitigation practices. I'm wondering if it has been able to do more testing, so the number is actually known. Any ideas?

tia
las

"In educated and affluent Massachusetts, coronavirus cases surged. The decline has yet to come."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/coronavirus-massachusetts-cases-high/2020/05/01/8b7b748c-8b2b-11ea-8ac1-bfb250876b7a_story.html

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. Testing alone makes no difference in the number of cases.

It only gives us more information on how many cases really are out there.

If not a single person on the planet had been tested at this point, Some 250,000, probably a lot more, would still have died of it by now.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. At Worldometer US page, you can sort on tests per capita

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

Massachusetts has done well in tests. Third most testing per million.
But its death rate per capita is fourth.
However a number of other states are deliberately under-reporting deaths.

[Wounded Bear]

3. That would actually make sense...

anywhere that they have ramped up testing has resulted in increased numbers of positive results. Not necessarily a surge in patients, per se, probably because if they can identify someone as positive they can get them isolated and reducing their individual contribution to R0.

Which tends to indicate that the number of cases out there is probably being vastly undercounted. Which is what Trump wants, but doesn't help our medical workers contain the outbreak.

[dflprincess]

4. I was just talking to my niece who works in the ER at one of the larger hospitals in the area

(she a phlebotomist).

And she did say the jump we've seen is because the hospital she's at and another one in Minneapolis are doing their own testing & doing a lot more of it. So that could very well be the reason there appears to have been a jump in Massachusetts.