Short of testing every person in the U.S., the best way to get accurate data on who and how many people have been infected with the coronavirus is to test randomly.
I am a professor of health policy and management at Indiana University, and random testing is exactly what we did in my state. From April 25 to May 1, our team randomly selected and tested thousands of Indiana residents, no matter if they’d been sick or not. From this testing we were able to get some of the first truly representative data on coronavirus infection rates at a state level. Continue reading.