Advertisement

The U.S. may be undercounting COVID-19 cases by a massive margin: Goldman

Yahoo Finance's Ethan Wolff-Mann joins Seana Smith to explain why Goldman Sachs is warning the U.S. may be undercounting coronavirus cases by a massive margin, after the crushing jobs numbers last Friday pointed to 20.5 million fewer payrolls in April compared to March.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: Welcome back to "The Ticker" here on Yahoo Finance. Goldman Sachs is out with a very interesting note. And it's tying the jobs report to the number of coronavirus cases-- so Goldman saying that the jobs report suggests that 2 million people may have had COVID-19 in the week when the official tally was only 500,000.

For more on this, we have Ethan Wolff-Mann. Ethan, what exactly are they tying this to, and how are they able to figure out that, while the official tally is only 500,000, they suggest that it could have been as much as 2 million?

ADVERTISEMENT

ETHAN WOLFF-MANN: So tucked into the jobs and jobs report is obviously this survey of people and their employment situation. And one of the things that you can see in this is, when people are asked, why aren't you at work-- are you employed, unemployed-- people said that they are employed, but they're out sick.

And looking at that number over time, Goldman Sachs noticed that it was way, way higher than usual. It was 100-- it was 1 million-- sorry, not 100-- 1 million in excess of what it normally would be in a normal April. And so that kind of suggests that a lot of people who weren't maybe-- been counted as either probable or confirmed cases for COVID-19 could have had it.

And I that's really interesting to looking-- looking at all of these indirect data points to get a better picture, because obviously, we don't have a particularly good handle on testing data. There's been so much-- so many issues with getting tests, and obviously safety of administering tests has been a very, very critical part-- especially in New York City, where we are.

And so you've seen a lot of people looking at mortality rates and other types of data, trying to get a better handle on things. One thing that I think is interesting to point out is that, I think on April 14, the CDC decided to start counting probable cases as well as confirmed cases. And the survey reference week for the Bureau of Labor statistics was right in there between, I think, April 12 and 18.

And so I think we're going to see, as this-- next month's data comes in, we'll see a bit more how the official count versus people who are out sick ends up. But I think this is a really interesting thing to look out for.

SEANA SMITH: Yeah, it certainly is extremely interesting. So for more on this-- thanks, Ethan.