False Positives - Chinese Wuhan flu - COVID-19

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From the New York Times no less:

Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be
Some of the nation’s leading public health experts are raising a new concern in the endless debate over coronavirus testing in the United States: The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus.

Most of these people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time.

Hmmm... But then, being the chief narrative-slinger for the progressive left they go on:

But researchers say the solution is not to test less, or to skip testing people without symptoms, as recently suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Instead, new data underscore the need for more widespread use of rapid tests, even if they are less sensitive.

We need the numbers to be high - even if they are false positives. A bit more on how this all works:

The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious.

This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are.

In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.

On Thursday, the United States recorded 45,604 new coronavirus cases, according to a database maintained by The Times. If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing.

The guy who invented PCR is a lot of fun - his autobiography: Dancing Naked in the Mind Field
Website here: Dr. Kary Banks Mullis
He was working on a fascinating idea:  Altermune - Chemically Programmable Immunity
Sadly, he passed away at 74 last year.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on August 30, 2020 9:15 AM.

A much needed nail in the coffin - Chinese Wuhan flu - COVID-19 was the previous entry in this blog.

Thin veneer of civilization - New York City is the next entry in this blog.

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