"Your Coronavirus Test Is Positive. Maybe It Shouldn’t Be."

Submitted by dmac24 on August 29th, 2020 at 8:06 PM

"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."

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testing.html

Rickett88

August 29th, 2020 at 8:23 PM ^

Thanks for the update.

I eagerly await the next one at 21:00. 

The sad thing too is how little the media have covered Hurricane Laura. Now granted I haven’t turned on a TV to watch network anything since April, but I just don’t see it much online. 

Jon06

August 30th, 2020 at 11:41 AM ^

It wasn't a pedophile ring. 39 children that had been reported missing were found, yes. But 13 of them were already somewhere safe even though they had been reported missing. The remaining 26 were judged by authorities to be at risk of sex trafficking, but that's just because they were missing. There's all kinds of explanations, including that one of their parents took them and the other parent didn't like it.

In 2011 there were something like 792,000 missing children found in the US out of 800,000 reported missing. There's not a lot of coverage of these 39 children because it's not actually news. It's just the Trump administration trying to smear the media for not giving them exceptional credit for doing something completely normal.

FauxMo

August 29th, 2020 at 8:30 PM ^

I am so tired of coronavirus, and I haven't gotten the virus yet (probably, but maybe). It's brought out the absolutely dumbest shit in people, ever. Refusing to wear a mask has become a great gesture of freedom and liberty? Are you fucking kidding me??? 

And P.S. I have significant doubts that masks do shit, and obviously Americans can't "social distance." But why not give it a shot to, you know, save two or three lives, maybe? 

RedRum

August 29th, 2020 at 8:42 PM ^

I really like you. You’re funny and a bit on the edges. You seek chaos with a logical center. Your post above, however, has multiple contradictions in logic. If masks don’t do shit, which I agree that they do more than not wearing a mask, but are helpless against this virus, then do you not see how the dump shits, as you described, are frustrated. The facts are too politically tainted to be discussed rationally. I see the same... wincing behavior, on both sides. Freedom is worth fighting for. Sacrifice is justified to saving people, even if it is ones own freedoms. Where between those two sentences is the right spot is the discussion. Science is helpful input, but just an input. We have to collectively decide, which means conversation. Which means listening to what people are saying. Which means patience. Patience is easy with love for your fellow American and human. Start with love for everyone and we can go far. Saying the other is stupid is the exact wrong thing to do. I love. I want to live. Bless this Nation and Go Blue. 

BlueMarrow

August 30th, 2020 at 11:35 AM ^

But why not give it a shot? May because it's quite possible masks actually make things worse. 

Instead of believing Fox or CNN talking heads, why not educate yourself. It's not like masks have not been scientifically studied. 

Think wearing a mask is "common sense?"

Explain this then:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1853618/

laninjafork

August 31st, 2020 at 6:59 AM ^

okay, thats a study showing the efficacy of wearing masks in a surgery theater to prevent surgical wound infection. it has almost zero relevance to the spread of an airborne respiratory virus with or without masks. if you want relevant information you might look to the scores of countries who haven’t been babies about mask wearing in public spaces. 

BlueLikeJazz

August 31st, 2020 at 11:47 AM ^

Good LORD. From the abstract of the study you linked to support no mask wearing:

"Masks may be used to protect the operating team from drops of infected blood and from airborne infections, but have not been proven to protect the patient operated by a healthy operating team."

Like, are you trying to seem dumb or is this just natural for you?

rob f

August 29th, 2020 at 9:11 PM ^

We all KNOW it's not Shakespeare you're quoting.

To be, or not to be? That is the question—Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And, by opposing, end them?”

To be sent to Bolivia, or not to be sent to Bolivia, that is the question... 

(...unless you can identify who you're quoting.)

The Mad Hatter

August 29th, 2020 at 8:38 PM ^

There is something broken, on a fundamental level, in the American psyche.

I don't know exactly what is it, or how it happened, but we are way different from people in other first world nations, and not in a good way.

RedRum

August 29th, 2020 at 9:32 PM ^

No, we have had increasingly imperial presidency starting with Wilson. Went to hyper speed with FDR and hasn’t turned around sense. I agree this President is awful. I also will add that the previous president was awful. As was the one before. Blue tie red tie arguments while we have a clear bipartisan agreement on the imperial President is the problem. We haven’t disarmed since WWI. A constitutional republic isn’t designed to survive perpetual war. I hope this post angers reds and blues. 
 

Go Blue (no pun intended)

Bo Harbaugh

August 29th, 2020 at 10:11 PM ^

Can agree with a lot of what you are saying, can disagree with a lot of what you are saying. 

Honestly just exhausted with this year and this administration overall.  To be a true Republic/Democracy we need more than just two damn parties.

The worst part is that people who are more similar than they care to admit (lower socio-economic and marginalized groups) are being fooled into pointing fingers at each other and not recognizing their shared collective suffering.

ndscott50

August 29th, 2020 at 10:13 PM ^

The they are all terrible argument is how you end up with someone with the incompetence level of Trump as president. 
 

I agrees that the balance of power between the legislative and executive branch is a growing problem and should be much more of an issue. I don’t think a return to a federal government operating as it did in 1900 is necessarily a good idea or would be effective given how interconnected our modern society is at this point.
 

Regarding disarming I would want to define that. The US requires at a minimum a navy/Air Force capable of defending the approaches to North America as well as an Army that can dominate North America. That can be accomplished with much less than we have now but would not be disarming. Also likely need a force capable of working with allies if shit gets really out of hand in the rest of the world.

 

Carpetbagger

August 31st, 2020 at 10:02 AM ^

Spot on RedRum. The reason there is so much corruption in government is there is so much government to corrupt. The reason there are so many big money lobbyists is because the government has so much big money to give out. It's both parties fault. Although there once was a wing of both parties that fought against that, I assume it's just PR now.

Can you imagine how much worse it would be if our founders hadn't been worried about exactly this outcome, and done everything they could to make each piece of the federal government as powerless as possible? Frankly it's amazing it's taken 250 years to get to this point.

Erik_in_Dayton

August 29th, 2020 at 10:15 PM ^

This could be a very long conversation, but I think hyper-individualism, media partisanship (Fox being the worst), and a consumer culture valuing ease and convenience as high priorities have lead to a situation in which a huge percentage of the population believes that they are entitled to their own (pleasing) reality. 

Perkis-Size Me

August 29th, 2020 at 10:59 PM ^

Forgive the novel here:

America is great for a lot of things, but many of us have a mindset of “Fuck you I’m an American I’m smarter than you I’m better than you and we can figure out the world’s problems without you because we’ve never lost a war.” And we have leadership that feeds that type of ego. So many of us think we’re invincible and we have leaders who feed that bullshit straight to the masses.

What separates us from many other nations is we have no idea how to (or have no desire to) think about the global collective good. We think only about ourselves and anyone else is a socialist who is not worth helping or is not worth giving the time of day to, because they would’ve sided with the redcoats, the Nazis, the Soviets, the Taliban, or The VietCong. We are so goddamn arrogant and self-righteous that it alienates us from the rest of a rapidly globalizing world. 

And it gets manifested in the result of only 11-12 countries accepting American citizens in its borders right now. The rest of the civilized world DOES NOT WANT US. 

BlueMan80

August 30th, 2020 at 12:57 AM ^

We don’t have a debate of ideas and agree to disagree anymore.  Instead, one side vilifies the other and forget using facts or logical reasoning to prove your case.  You just say whatever you want and the more fantastic, confrontational, and conspiratorial it is, the better.  It’s a battle of ideologies which doesn’t work in a world with many shades of gray.  This works well for the current occupant of the White House.

I was listening to “American Elections Wicked Game” podcast about the 1976 election of Ford vs. Carter.  Ford was a moderate Republican.  He agonized over who to appoint as his replacement as VP when he assumed the presidency, because Ford wanted to be well positioned to be the Republican nominee in 1976.  Nelson Rockefeller, a liberal Republican, or Ron Reagan, a conservative Republican were his major choices.  Yes, Republicans used to exist in 3 flavors because everything wasn’t a purity test.  I was a moderate Republican and then party left me on my own.

bronxblue

August 29th, 2020 at 9:30 PM ^

So, the article really doesn't convey the sentiment of the headline.  It's saying that the current testing apparatus fails to convey the current state of a person's infection (i.e. if she has passed the stage on which she can transmit the disease to others) and that if anything what we need are more rapid testing so that people can determine if they are carriers of a transmittable state of COVID-19 or not.  It mostly highlights that the current tests are too sensitive, not that being positive for a test is inherently bad because it adds to a bottleneck that exists, again, mostly because of poor testing schemas. 

It's articles like this that actually cause more issues than they help because, as I can tell reading the comments here, most people didn't even read past the first paragraph and already came to their conclusions.