When will this shit end?

[efcfanwirral]

7 minutes ago, steviewevie said:

Rise could also be down to students coming back...big student population in Manchester.

100% - so many halls in the city centre, including those two that are completely locked down 

[stuartbert two hats]

4 hours ago, zeppelin said:

Sat across a pub table, I think the likelihood is low but I'll err on the side of caution.

 

Yeah he's doing so. We all had the app and checked in at the venues so that should do part of it I believe as well.

I was going to run some errands today but put them off til tomorrow. Feels like a bad choice now.

You spent all day opposite him drinking? Definitely isolate.

[stuartbert two hats]

1 hour ago, steviewevie said:

Manchester takes the lead!

That's a sizable drop for Bolton, and a smallish one for the home of Blossoms. I'll take that.

[Ozanne]

This tickled me, good form from the Chef.

 

 

[efcfanwirral]

43 minutes ago, Ozanne said:

This tickled me, good form from the Chef.

 

 

That's amazing 😂

[gizmoman]

The guy who invented the PCR test currently being used to test for Covid explains it's limitations and how it can amplify the tiniest fragment of material to a measureable level. In short the test is all but useless to find out if someone is ill or infectious.

 

[gizmoman]

 

[Mark E. Spliff]

11 minutes ago, gizmoman said:

The guy who invented the PCR test currently being used to test for Covid explains it's limitations and how it can amplify the tiniest fragment of material to a measureable level. In short the test is all but useless to find out if someone is ill or infectious.

 

You're too easy.  Every time I see you post some mad shit, it takes about 3 seconds on Google to find pages of fact-checkers explaining why it's politically-motivated crap.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jul/07/blog-posting/covid-19-tests-are-not-scientifically-meaningless/

[ace56blaa]

yeah lets not entertain conspiracies on this thread

[Matt42]

As you know I’ve been someone a bit forward about thinking that trump will win the election. Going into the debates now I really don’t have a clue how this is going to pan out.

I think it’s either going to be very close or a total shock (either side included). Really difficult to call.

[themuel]

3 hours ago, Euphoricape said:

I live in Cornwall, and we have in the past week had cases in 2 local secondary schools and both main colleges in my area. It seems more prevalent here now than it did any time back in March/April. SW as a whole may be far less affected but its still certainly felt where I live at the moment.

 

Where in Cornwall? I’m down here too and a teacher. 

[Leyrulion]

2 hours ago, Fuzzy Afro said:

. I wonder if they might be about to get hospitality restricted to takeaway only.

They've been saying that for the past 3 weeks. 

If they introduced it there would be uproar. Local/national officials are making no effort to bring the general public on side. For people to support extra measures they need to brief on the data for the local situation, hospital cases, deaths, care home rates etc etc.

There's none of that really, just this rate per 100k that I think is very difficult to translate into a real world experience.

[zahidf]

13 minutes ago, Matt42 said:

As you know I’ve been someone a bit forward about thinking that trump will win the election. Going into the debates now I really don’t have a clue how this is going to pan out.

I think it’s either going to be very close or a total shock (either side included). Really difficult to call.

Lol why? Biden is +3 in Georgia and +7 nationally on average.

[gizmoman]

16 minutes ago, Mark E. Spliff said:

You're too easy.  Every time I see you post some mad shit, it takes about 3 seconds on Google to find pages of fact-checkers explaining why it's politically-motivated crap.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jul/07/blog-posting/covid-19-tests-are-not-scientifically-meaningless/

"mad shit" this is the guy that invented the test and you would rather not listen to what he has to say because it's not what you want to hear.

On 9/5/2020 at 9:26 AM, Toilet Duck said:

There’s two things really going on here, one is the sensitivity of PCR and the other is whether the test as it currently is can accurately quantify viral load. The sensitivity is an issue and could indeed pick up dead viral fragments or contamination. As it happens, it’s something I raised with the head of our diagnostics solutions group here in Ireland, since discharges from hospital were taking weeks past symptoms fading, but required two consecutive negative tests. Patients were still on COVID wards, surrounded by other patients shedding tons of virus, so I asked him if anyone had been moved to a single room to convalesce once symptoms disappeared and if they ended up he discharged quicker. He agreed that it was a worry, but there wasn’t the bed space to organise in such a way. So, yes, the test is super sensitive and there can be lots of positive results that may not be infectious...the second part is where the criticism levelled is by those that don’t really understand how PCR works. It’s basically a qualitative assay (yes/no), at best, semi-quantitative (which is where these CT values come in). They do give an indication of how much viral RNA is there, but only relative to something else. Input has a huge impact on the CT value, so unless every sample is collected in exactly the same way, it’s impossible to compare them to each other. There have been many studies (long before coronavirus) to see if CT values can accurately measure viral load, and most have concluded you can’t (those that show a correlation were smaller studies with the same person/centre collecting all samples  the same way). 
 

so, basically, yes, the test is too sensitive for the next phase of our management of this, but no, testing centres haven’t been deliberately not telling people whether they are infectious or not. The new rapid tests are only starting to get approval, so, testing was using the best we had available, but we can now start to shift the question we are asking from “infected?” to “infectious?”...the caveat being we don’t have a clear idea of how much virus makes you infectious!

Maybe you should read what toilet duck says, "the test is too sensitive for the next phase of our management of this" maybe you think he's full of mad shit too. The point being made is that the test can detect insignificant portions of the virus and still give a positive result, that is not even scientifically controversial.

[gizmoman]

28 minutes ago, Mark E. Spliff said:

You're too easy.  Every time I see you post some mad shit, it takes about 3 seconds on Google to find pages of fact-checkers explaining why it's politically-motivated crap.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jul/07/blog-posting/covid-19-tests-are-not-scientifically-meaningless/

You didn't even take the trouble to read your fact checker,

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-pcr/fact-check-inventor-of-method-used-to-test-for-covid-19-didnt-say-it-cant-be-used-in-virus-detection-idUSKBN24420X

“It is important to note that detecting viral material by PCR does not indicate that the virus is fully intact and infectious, i.e. able to cause infection in other people. The isolation of infectious virus from positive individuals requires virus culture methods. These methods can only be conducted in laboratories with specialist containment facilities and are time consuming and complex.”

 

[Fuzzy Afro]

Media reporting that Liverpool will be next to get a ban on households mixing in hospitality. London decision deferred until next week. 

[Mark E. Spliff]

8 minutes ago, gizmoman said:

You didn't even take the trouble to read your fact checker,

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-pcr/fact-check-inventor-of-method-used-to-test-for-covid-19-didnt-say-it-cant-be-used-in-virus-detection-idUSKBN24420X

“It is important to note that detecting viral material by PCR does not indicate that the virus is fully intact and infectious, i.e. able to cause infection in other people. The isolation of infectious virus from positive individuals requires virus culture methods. These methods can only be conducted in laboratories with specialist containment facilities and are time consuming and complex.”

 

Okay - it looks like we're stuck with our own resident 'alt fact' poster, determined to dig up whatever screwball, paranoid, conspiracy-theorist, anti-science crap and share it with us.

Let's at least have some fun with this.  Would anyone care to have a look at gizoman's post I've quoted and spot what he's done wrong.  It's very obvious but you'll need to cross-reference it against my previous post which he's replying to.

[gizmoman]

9 minutes ago, Mark E. Spliff said:

Okay - it looks like we're stuck with our own resident 'alt fact' poster, determined to dig up whatever screwball, paranoid, conspiracy-theorist, anti-science crap and share it with us.

Let's at least have some fun with this.  Would anyone care to have a look at gizoman's post I've quoted and spot what he's done wrong.  It's very obvious but you'll need to cross-reference it against my previous post which he's replying to.

If you're referring to the fact it's a different link to your fact check, it's actually one of the ones they refer to in their article. It's a quote from Public Health England by the way. How you can claim a factually correct view of a scientific test is "anti-science" is beyond me, rather than being obnoxiously dismissive why don't you point out why what I've said is incorrect?

[Toilet Duck]

28 minutes ago, gizmoman said:

The guy who invented the PCR test currently being used to test for Covid explains it's limitations and how it can amplify the tiniest fragment of material to a measureable level. In short the test is all but useless to find out if someone is ill or infectious.

 

So, rather than just dismiss this as conspiracy theory nonsense, let's actually talk it through. Kary Mullis was a smart guy, obviously, he wouldn't have won the Nobel prize otherwise (though he was also a bit of an oddball too...check out his company Star Relics where he tried to make money amplifying bits of DNA from Elvis's socks!). This interview was a long time time ago, though still relevant, unfortunately he is no longer with us. He was one of the scientists who believed that HIV was not the cause of AIDS (there's a grain of truth in there, "necessary but not sufficient" is how we describe it now, but it also wasn't as black and white as he and Peter Duesberg made it out to be (he claimed it was just an unfortunate bystander virus))...and that's the problem with many "conspiracy theories"...there is often a grain of truth in there somewhere, but it gets amplified to become the entire story, when science, and biology in particular, is generally never that simple (it's all grey areas, thresholds, spectra, and billions of interactions in complex systems rather than quantal features...unless you are talking about something that is really black and white..ie dead or alive!). 

Anyway, back to the point at hand. Yes, PCR is so sensitive that it will amplify up bits of RNA that are left over from a recent infection (actually it amplifies DNA, we have to convert the RNA back into DNA to amplify it for COVID). If you cycle the reaction enough times, you will be able to amplify tiny quantities of RNA that may not be infectious at all. There are calls to use the cycle threshold as a measure of viral load, but the way the test is set up, this isn't a very accurate measure as it is prone to vary wildly depending on how much RNA you put into the reaction in the first place, which is a function of how the sample was taken...therefore, you can't really extrapolate across testing sites and come up with an accurate answer. We have our own in-house testing site for our students and we are working up a quantitative PCR that will accurately measure viral load, but it's more complicated than the test that is being used worldwide (and difficult to do on a scale of 100s of millions of tests)...and even then, there's still a problem with that, namely we have no idea what viral load is infectious...we also don't know whether you are at the tail end of the infection or the start (and will your viral load increase and become infectious?...we are talking about a replicating virus, so you would need a quantitative PCR test every day for a few days to see what direction your "viral load" was going in...which is logistically challenging, especially if you have tested positive and should be isolating!)...The other reason we have been using PCR is that up to now, we haven't had any option. A PCR test is dead simple to design, all you need is the genomic sequence of the thing you want to detect. This was published for SARS-CoV-2 back in January, and everyone went off and made PCR tests immediately (and started the process of making RNA-based vaccines too!). So, short of any other option, this was the best we had available.

Knowing someone is positive for SARS-CoV-2 is important. When they come into hospital, the healthcare workers who are looking after them can get vaccinated for other respiratory viruses and causes of pneumonia, but they can't yet for COVID, so they need to know what the status of the patient is and assume if they have a positive test that they may be infectious, thus they are managed as such. So, the results are neither scientifically, nor clinically meaningless. Far from it in fact. There's two ways to interpret a positive result...1)maybe infectious 2) maybe not...but unless you know for sure, the prudent thing to do is err on the side of caution. There's still far too much we don't know. 

However, in addition to designing the PCR tests, as the different genes were identified and the structure of the spike protein in particular was solved, new tests started to be developed based on this information. Antibody tests. These allow for the use of the spike protein as bait to detect circulating antibodies to the virus in our blood and are used for seroprevalence studies to estimate how many people may have had the virus (which is useful to study the dynamics of the outbreak). And once we started to characterise the actual antibodies, antigen tests became possible. The antibody tests were designed first as we knew what the different genes did pretty quickly (since it's a coronavirus and the structure of the genome is similar to other coronaviruses), therefore picking the spike gene and making protein out of it to be used to detect circulating antibodies was straightforward enough. Identifying what the best antibodies were to detect the virus (the reverse assay) took longer as it required more detailed analysis (antibody characterisation is more complex than making protein from a gene sequence). But these were identified too and now form the basis of the new rapid tests that are rolling out. These are very accurate, but not infallible. However, they are useful as screening tests (and are way more accurate than other screening tests we routinely use, such as mammography for breast cancer). The nice thing about them is they detect viral protein, rather than viral RNA, so they are more likely to be identifying intact virus. As such, they allow us to switch the question from "am I infected" to "am I infectious" (not with 100% certainty, but better than we can at the moment). At this stage of the pandemic, this becomes a more relevant question. However, while the tests have been designed and validated, they still need to be made in sufficient numbers for us to use them, hence they haven't replaced PCR tests yet. There are hundreds of millions of them coming on stream now, so I would expect them to be deployed in many scenarios (I know you don't like the idea of having to have a negative test to do things, but it might be where we land for a while until vaccines help us reach a degree of protection in the population). There was no conspiracy though to use PCR to artificially inflate case numbers, it just happened to be the only test we had. We will now have different ones, so we can use them differently. It just takes time to develop these things!

 

[Toilet Duck]

1 hour ago, gizmoman said:

 

Sure while I'm at it, I'll deal with this one too...This all seems perfectly reasonable to me. In fact, given what we know about the impact of SARS-CoV-2 on heart tissue, simply ruling out COVID as a contributory factor in a cardiac death because we can't say with 100% certainly that it was or wasn't would be pretty odd for me. However, we really don't know everything about the pathology of this disease at all (we know a bit, but there's still loads to find out). There are receptors for the virus on tons of tissues, so saying definitively that is had no role just because the person didn't have a cough would be wrong in my opinion. All possible contributory factors are recorded and a coroners report decides on what the likely cause of death was. Until we know for sure what SARS-CoV-2 infection can do, then again, its prudent to record it on the death certificate. If you want a measure of fatality that removes the ambiguity, then excess deaths might be a better measure (in the UK, they are higher than the recorded COVID deaths, in Ireland, they are actually significantly lower (about 33% lower) since we have been recording probable cases...ie, people with no test carried out that had COVID symptoms at the time of their death). Anyway, for me, there's nothing to see here. 

Edited September 30, 2020 by Toilet Duck

[gizmoman]

7 minutes ago, Toilet Duck said:

So, rather than just dismiss this as conspiracy theory nonsense, let's actually talk it through. Kary Mullis was a smart guy, obviously, he wouldn't have won the Nobel prize otherwise (though he was also a bit of an oddball too...check out his company Star Relics where he tried to make money amplifying bits of DNA from Elvis's socks!). This interview was a long time time ago, though still relevant, unfortunately he is no longer with us. He was one of the scientists who believed that HIV was not the cause of AIDS (there's a grain of truth in there, "necessary but not sufficient" is how we describe it now, but it also wasn't as black and white as he and Peter Duesberg made it out to be (he claimed it was just an unfortunate bystander virus))...and that's the problem with many "conspiracy theories"...there is often a grain of truth in there somewhere, but it gets amplified to become the entire story, when science, and biology in particular, is generally never that simple (it's all grey areas, thresholds, spectra, and billions of interactions in complex systems rather than quantal features...unless you are talking about something that is really black and white..ie dead or alive!). 

Anyway, back to the point at hand. Yes, PCR is so sensitive that it will amplify up bits of RNA that are left over from a recent infection (actually it amplifies DNA, we have to convert the RNA back into DNA to amplify it for COVID). If you cycle the reaction enough times, you will be able to amplify tiny quantities of RNA that may not be infectious at all. There are calls to use the cycle threshold as a measure of viral load, but the way the test is set up, this isn't a very accurate measure as it is prone to vary wildly depending on how much RNA you put into the reaction in the first place, which is a function of how the sample was taken...therefore, you can't really extrapolate across testing sites and come up with an accurate answer. We have our own in-house testing site for our students and we are working up a quantitative PCR that will accurately measure viral load, but it's more complicated than the test that is being used worldwide (and difficult to do on a scale of 100s of millions of tests)...and even then, there's still a problem with that, namely we have no idea what viral load is infectious...we also don't know whether you are at the tail end of the infection or the start (and will your viral load increase and become infectious?...we are talking about a replicating virus, so you would need a quantitative PCR test every day for a few days to see what direction your "viral load" was going in...which is logistically challenging, especially if you have tested positive and should be isolating!)...The other reason we have been using PCR is that up to now, we haven't had any option. A PCR test is dead simple to design, all you need is the genomic sequence of the thing you want to detect. This was published for SARS-CoV-2 back in January, and everyone went off and made PCR tests immediately (and started the process of making RNA-based vaccines too!). So, short of any other option, this was the best we had available.

Knowing someone is positive for SARS-CoV-2 is important. When they come into hospital, the healthcare workers who are looking after them can get vaccinated for other respiratory viruses and causes of pneumonia, but they can't yet for COVID, so they need to know what the status of the patient is and assume if they have a positive test that they may be infectious, thus they are managed as such. So, the results are neither scientifically, nor clinically meaningless. Far from it in fact. There's two ways to interpret a positive result...1)maybe infectious 2) maybe not...but unless you know for sure, the prudent thing to do is err on the side of caution. There's still far too much we don't know. 

However, in addition to designing the PCR tests, as the different genes were identified and the structure of the spike protein in particular was solved, new tests started to be developed based on this information. Antibody tests. These allow for the use of the spike protein as bait to detect circulating antibodies to the virus in our blood and are used for seroprevalence studies to estimate how many people may have had the virus (which is useful to study the dynamics of the outbreak). And once we started to characterise the actual antibodies, antigen tests became possible. The antibody tests were designed first as we knew what the different genes did pretty quickly (since it's a coronavirus and the structure of the genome is similar to other coronaviruses), therefore picking the spike gene and making protein out of it to be used to detect circulating antibodies was straightforward enough. Identifying what the best antibodies were to detect the virus (the reverse assay) took longer as it required more detailed analysis (antibody characterisation is more complex than making protein from a gene sequence). But these were identified too and now form the basis of the new rapid tests that are rolling out. These are very accurate, but not infallible. However, they are useful as screening tests (and are way more accurate than other screening tests we routinely use, such as mammography for breast cancer). The nice thing about them is they detect viral protein, rather than viral RNA, so they are more likely to be identifying intact virus. As such, they allow us to switch the question from "am I infected" to "am I infectious" (not with 100% certainty, but better than we can at the moment). At this stage of the pandemic, this becomes a more relevant question. However, while the tests have been designed and validated, they still need to be made in sufficient numbers for us to use them, hence they haven't replaced PCR tests yet. There are hundreds of millions of them coming on stream now, so I would expect them to be deployed in many scenarios (I know you don't like the idea of having to have a negative test to do things, but it might be where we land for a while until vaccines help us reach a degree of protection in the population). There was no conspiracy though to use PCR to artificially inflate case numbers, it just happened to be the only test we had. We will now have different ones, so we can use them differently. It just takes time to develop these things!

 

Thanks for the detailed response, I was really referring to the test being used in the general population, it obviously makes sense to err on the side of caution in hospitals, but we should still bear in mind that not all positives are going to lead to covid illness, at the moment the government are looking at raw figures and over-reacting IMO. Never said there was a deliberate inflating of the numbers, it's just a side effect of the amplification used leading to positive results from possibly innocent samples.

[Toilet Duck]

1 minute ago, gizmoman said:

Thanks for the detailed response, I was really referring to the test being used in the general population, it obviously makes sense to err on the side of caution in hospitals, but we should still bear in mind that not all positives are going to lead to covid illness, at the moment the government are looking at raw figures and over-reacting IMO. Never said there was a deliberate inflating of the numbers, it's just a side effect of the amplification used leading to positive results from possibly innocent samples.

No worries. Unfortunately, at the moment, we don't have a different option. But we will soon!

[gizmoman]

8 minutes ago, Toilet Duck said:

Sure while I'm at it, I'll deal with this one too...This all seems perfectly reasonable to me. In fact, given what we know about the impact of SARS-CoV-2 on heart tissue, simply ruling out COVID as a contributory factor in a cardiac death because we can't say with 100% certainly that it was or wasn't would be pretty odd for me. However, we really don't know everything about the pathology of this disease at all (we know a bit, but there's still loads to find out). There are receptors for the virus on tons of tissues, so saying definitively that is had no role just because the person didn't have a cough would be wrong in my opinion. All possible contributory factors are recorded and a coroners report decides on what the likely cause of death was. Until we know for sure what SARS-CoV-2 infection can do, then again, its prudent to record it on the death certificate. If you want a measure of fatality that removes the ambiguity, then excess deaths might be a better measure (in the UK, they are higher than the recorded COVID deaths, in Ireland, they are actually significantly lower (about 33% lower) since we have been recording probable cases...ie, people with no test carried out that had COVID symptoms at the time of their death). Anyway, for me, there's nothing to see here. 

Fair enough, I posted it to show the actual death figures may not be that accurate, (same as the test figures), everyone on this thread is obsessed with the figures, it's important to have some perspective and understand that the figures may not be as bad as they may appear.

[efcfanwirral]

https://investor.regeneron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/regenerons-regn-cov2-antibody-cocktail-reduced-viral-levels-and

Just saw this - a study into drugs used on non hospitalised patients, which on the surface sounds very promising. @Toilet Duck what do you reckon? 

[SheffJeff]

27 minutes ago, Toilet Duck said:

So, rather than just dismiss this as conspiracy theory nonsense, let's actually talk it through. Kary Mullis was a smart guy, obviously, he wouldn't have won the Nobel prize otherwise (though he was also a bit of an oddball too...check out his company Star Relics where he tried to make money amplifying bits of DNA from Elvis's socks!). This interview was a long time time ago, though still relevant, unfortunately he is no longer with us. He was one of the scientists who believed that HIV was not the cause of AIDS (there's a grain of truth in there, "necessary but not sufficient" is how we describe it now, but it also wasn't as black and white as he and Peter Duesberg made it out to be (he claimed it was just an unfortunate bystander virus))...and that's the problem with many "conspiracy theories"...there is often a grain of truth in there somewhere, but it gets amplified to become the entire story, when science, and biology in particular, is generally never that simple (it's all grey areas, thresholds, spectra, and billions of interactions in complex systems rather than quantal features...unless you are talking about something that is really black and white..ie dead or alive!). 

Anyway, back to the point at hand. Yes, PCR is so sensitive that it will amplify up bits of RNA that are left over from a recent infection (actually it amplifies DNA, we have to convert the RNA back into DNA to amplify it for COVID). If you cycle the reaction enough times, you will be able to amplify tiny quantities of RNA that may not be infectious at all. There are calls to use the cycle threshold as a measure of viral load, but the way the test is set up, this isn't a very accurate measure as it is prone to vary wildly depending on how much RNA you put into the reaction in the first place, which is a function of how the sample was taken...therefore, you can't really extrapolate across testing sites and come up with an accurate answer. We have our own in-house testing site for our students and we are working up a quantitative PCR that will accurately measure viral load, but it's more complicated than the test that is being used worldwide (and difficult to do on a scale of 100s of millions of tests)...and even then, there's still a problem with that, namely we have no idea what viral load is infectious...we also don't know whether you are at the tail end of the infection or the start (and will your viral load increase and become infectious?...we are talking about a replicating virus, so you would need a quantitative PCR test every day for a few days to see what direction your "viral load" was going in...which is logistically challenging, especially if you have tested positive and should be isolating!)...The other reason we have been using PCR is that up to now, we haven't had any option. A PCR test is dead simple to design, all you need is the genomic sequence of the thing you want to detect. This was published for SARS-CoV-2 back in January, and everyone went off and made PCR tests immediately (and started the process of making RNA-based vaccines too!). So, short of any other option, this was the best we had available.

Knowing someone is positive for SARS-CoV-2 is important. When they come into hospital, the healthcare workers who are looking after them can get vaccinated for other respiratory viruses and causes of pneumonia, but they can't yet for COVID, so they need to know what the status of the patient is and assume if they have a positive test that they may be infectious, thus they are managed as such. So, the results are neither scientifically, nor clinically meaningless. Far from it in fact. There's two ways to interpret a positive result...1)maybe infectious 2) maybe not...but unless you know for sure, the prudent thing to do is err on the side of caution. There's still far too much we don't know. 

However, in addition to designing the PCR tests, as the different genes were identified and the structure of the spike protein in particular was solved, new tests started to be developed based on this information. Antibody tests. These allow for the use of the spike protein as bait to detect circulating antibodies to the virus in our blood and are used for seroprevalence studies to estimate how many people may have had the virus (which is useful to study the dynamics of the outbreak). And once we started to characterise the actual antibodies, antigen tests became possible. The antibody tests were designed first as we knew what the different genes did pretty quickly (since it's a coronavirus and the structure of the genome is similar to other coronaviruses), therefore picking the spike gene and making protein out of it to be used to detect circulating antibodies was straightforward enough. Identifying what the best antibodies were to detect the virus (the reverse assay) took longer as it required more detailed analysis (antibody characterisation is more complex than making protein from a gene sequence). But these were identified too and now form the basis of the new rapid tests that are rolling out. These are very accurate, but not infallible. However, they are useful as screening tests (and are way more accurate than other screening tests we routinely use, such as mammography for breast cancer). The nice thing about them is they detect viral protein, rather than viral RNA, so they are more likely to be identifying intact virus. As such, they allow us to switch the question from "am I infected" to "am I infectious" (not with 100% certainty, but better than we can at the moment). At this stage of the pandemic, this becomes a more relevant question. However, while the tests have been designed and validated, they still need to be made in sufficient numbers for us to use them, hence they haven't replaced PCR tests yet. There are hundreds of millions of them coming on stream now, so I would expect them to be deployed in many scenarios (I know you don't like the idea of having to have a negative test to do things, but it might be where we land for a while until vaccines help us reach a degree of protection in the population). There was no conspiracy though to use PCR to artificially inflate case numbers, it just happened to be the only test we had. We will now have different ones, so we can use them differently. It just takes time to develop these things!

 

I do wish just for one day I had half of your knowledge though I do suspect my first thought would then be 'so I know where we can get some of Elvis's DNA... let's clone the fucker'.

Edited September 30, 2020 by SheffJeff
Drunken typo