Does COVID-19 Testing Create More Cases? An Empirical Evidence on the Importance of Mass Testing During a Pandemic

The importance of testing and surveillance of an infectious disease cannot be underestimated. The testing is the first step to detect an infectious disease, and mass 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 study whether massive testing is the reason for detecting more positive COVID-19 cases. 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. Our results indicate a negative relationship between the number of positive cases and the number of tests performed in the past months. The large-scale testing may have helped identify 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.