I appreciate your reply, but I don’t believe it deals with my concern that the article seems to take the positivity rate seriously and with a grain of salt at the same time. Clearly, testing regimes matter. That’s why I suggested in my comment that an “adjustment” needed to be made for tests per 1,000.

I just don’t understand what non-obvious point the article was making. Yes, the national positivity rate is now “reliable.” That doesn’t make it useful. So long as we are testing only suspected cases, the positivity ratio will remain high, and the shape of the reported-cases curve will mirror the shape of the prevalence curve. If not, then not.

If widening the testing net causes the number of known cases to rise, someone will have to write an article explaining why those numbers aren’t flat even though prevalence has not changed or may even be going down.