Dr. Fauci explained very clearly and simply the problem with daily testing.
Fauci’s background is in AIDS. It’s what he’s worked on his entire career. With AIDS, you can take a test, come back negative, and a year later if you haven’t done any at risk activities, you can be assured you are still negative. Not so with SARS-CoV-2.
With a virus as transmissible and prevalent as corona, you can test negative on Monday, and be shedding virus on Tuesday. A negative test gives you some confidence that you weren’t infected yesterday. It gives you no confidence that you weren’t exposed this morning.
The final nail in the proverbial Daily Testing coffin, even aside from the absurd logistical challenges, even aside from the civil rights issues of baring someone from leaving their home unless they wear a special colored armband, the biggest problem is that it just doesn’t work. The false positive rates on a test like this will be high enough that daily repeated testing will give the average uninfected person a 50% chance of testing positive by the end of the week. Don’t forget that we now have evidence that even a 14-day quarantine is insufficient, and that totally asymptomatic people can shed virus.
Ignoring that TFA is a sales pitch, which makes the whole thing rather nauseating, I hope that people will start taking a hard look at the absurdity of such a response, and perhaps not usher in a totalitarian regime with such open arms.
There’s certainly some sick irony involved in this post’s title. Gives me shivers.
Fauci’s background is in AIDS. It’s what he’s worked on his entire career. With AIDS, you can take a test, come back negative, and a year later if you haven’t done any at risk activities, you can be assured you are still negative. Not so with SARS-CoV-2.
With a virus as transmissible and prevalent as corona, you can test negative on Monday, and be shedding virus on Tuesday. A negative test gives you some confidence that you weren’t infected yesterday. It gives you no confidence that you weren’t exposed this morning.
The final nail in the proverbial Daily Testing coffin, even aside from the absurd logistical challenges, even aside from the civil rights issues of baring someone from leaving their home unless they wear a special colored armband, the biggest problem is that it just doesn’t work. The false positive rates on a test like this will be high enough that daily repeated testing will give the average uninfected person a 50% chance of testing positive by the end of the week. Don’t forget that we now have evidence that even a 14-day quarantine is insufficient, and that totally asymptomatic people can shed virus.
Ignoring that TFA is a sales pitch, which makes the whole thing rather nauseating, I hope that people will start taking a hard look at the absurdity of such a response, and perhaps not usher in a totalitarian regime with such open arms.
There’s certainly some sick irony involved in this post’s title. Gives me shivers.