Herd immunity from sanity

It is my understanding that the viral load is as high in asymptomatic people as in symptomatic people. Do you have different data?
I understand the hole between infection and detection.

 

So this would just make @Eleuthera twice as wrong.

 

How does it save lives when you have no money, no job?

 

Compare that to Fauci’s lack of travel restrictions. Compare Trump’s travel ban to the Chinese Communist Party’s global Covid-19 global proliferation policy.

Fauci stated that Trump’s China travel van saved thousands of lives.

 

That was before it got back to the West Coast from Europe, because Trump never learned the world is round.

 

Edit:
Wait let me help.
But, but, Obama.

 

How did Covid 19 get to Europe? Trump did ban travel from the EU after the outbreak in Italy. How did Covid 19 get into Italy?

Why didn't the medical experts warn about the first case in the US which occured on January 21 in Washington state from a man who had traveled from Wuhan? Trump acted whilst the medical experts sat on their hands believing the cover up from the Chinese Communist Party and their puppet - the WHO.

 

That was almost as good as but Obama, but not quite.
If Trump did such a good job why do we lead in deaths per million over most of the developed countries?

 

How do you guys cram so much wrong into a single sentence?

Not the Left, not a ban when you let thousands in, and there was no fight.

Oh, and he ignored the CDC.

 

Trump did everything Fauci and all the other medical experts recommended. Ask them.

 

Yes most studies show similar viral loads.

The problem with symptomatic vs. asymptomatic with PCR testing is timing. PCR is most likely (80% chance) to actually catch infection 3 days after onset of symptoms. Any other day post infection the chance of correctly identifying infected individuals ranges from 0% on day of infection to 33% three weeks post infection.

So, if we limit testing only to symptomatic individuals and time the testing to happen 3 days after onset of symptoms we can expect to catch 80% of infections and record them in statistics. This is the very best we can do. Any other strategy and our identification of infection goes down.

For example, we do a mass testing at a workplace because Bob in HR got sick and tested hot. We obviously want to test before others he infected are symptomatic, right? Well, if they aren’t symptomatic we only have a 0% to 60% chance of identifying those presymptomatic individuals. Infected individuals that aren’t caught by the test go back to work unless they were caught kissing Bob in the copier room. Unless the business decides to quarantine the whole workforce. In that case all the infected individuals are home infecting their families because we don’t practice mitigation at home.

In a hospital setting, symptomatic individuals are tested repeatedly until they test hot. In some cases several tests must be administered over several days to produce a positive test. Outside of the hospital this rarely happens. Asymptomatic infected individuals that are missed outside hospital settings are never retested and never end up in statistics or in quarantine.

I believe this is why testing was not ramped up like many people wanted. A few months ago people were telling me the only way to end the pandemic was to test everyone who wanted testing. But that’s obviously a waste of time with PCR. PCR was never intended to be a technology for diagnosing disease especially in pre and asymptomatic individuals. It works very well if we know genetic material exists in our sample. Like if we test hair follicles or other tissues containing cell nuclei. But when it comes to disease detection, the genetic material we are looking for may or may not be present in our sample. It varies by disease progression, individual variations in disease presentation, sampling methods, skill of the sampler and blind luck.

At this point I’m convinced the maniacal calls for increased testing were all political. Experts have known from the start PCR has very limited ability to supply data necessary for contact tracing and quarantine, especially in a free society. People in the US aren’t going to mass quarantine if they go get a PCR test that comes back negative. Especially when the narrative has been that testing is accurate. It’s a catch 22 situation made worse by allowing the public to believe things about PCR testing that scientifically we knew weren’t true all along.

It would have been better to say PCR tests suck and told people they should quarantine regardless of what PCR tests revealed if they had contact with an infected person. Probably wouldn’t have worked in the US, but at least the trust in “experts” wouldn’t have been eroded further in the small percentage of citizens who still care about credibility of “experts” and don’t blindly appeal to authority.

To be clear, I’m not trying to disparage the medical community or anything. I’m just pointing out the realities of what’s going on.

 

I don’t know what you have going on with @Eleuthera.

But the information I’ve provided above demonstrates the accepted case counts we see on Worldometer etc. are very low compared to reality. This means the case fatality data is meaningless. It means infection fatality data is also meaningless if based on PCR data. Yet we see media and politicians basing rhetoric and policy on demonstrably faulty data. That’s what concerns @Eleuthera and I.

In the past I’ve written extensively how this undercounting of cases affects estimates of how close or far we are from herd immunity. Apparently emotional response to the words “herd immunity” disallow for acceptance of the underlying facts on PCR shortcomings because I’ve been through all this multiple times on PF. Yet people still have blind faith in a technology never intended and ill suited for the task we’ve applied it to.

 

I don't think it's all doom and gloom.
By the time Bob tested positive and got the test back you are now closer to the sweet spot.
The same would be true if Bob was an asymptomatic as part of a group of symptomatics.
Your problem is more important if you are trying to screen people to say they don't have it.

 

You are welcome to think what you want. The fact remains PCR testing is a very ineffective tool for limiting spread of this virus. And it was marketed to the public as the best way to limit spread for months. It’s time to accept reality instead of blaming a single politician for proliferation of the virus.

 

So would you agree there is an 80% chance to find out if you caught covid from bob?

 

No. Absolutely not. More like 50%.

If you were kissing Bob in the copier room and a few days later became symptomatic, then waited 3 days to be tested, there would be an 80% chance your PCR test would catch your infection (if you are infected). In any other scenario the chances of an infection being “caught” by a single PCR test is drastically less than 80%.

 

That's not what I'm talking about.
Bob catches covid from a Trump rally starts felling bad after 6 days
you catch it from Bob on day 3.
Bob gets tested.
Bob gets test back - 3 days.
Bob calls you and you as well as others get tested.
You get tested the next day. Day 7 or 8.

 

Well if Bob gets tested on the day he gets sick there’s only a 60% chance Bob’s test comes back positive. There’s a 40% chance Bob never makes the call because his test came back negative. In that case you have no idea you are at risk until you are symptomatic. Or you are one of the 30-40% that never show symptoms and never get tested yourself.

You can create perfect hypothetical scenarios but that isn’t reality. And even perfect hypothetical scenarios completely miss 1 out of 5 cases.

Serious questions: Do you think a Biden administration will come clean on this stuff with the American people? Would a Hillary administration have told us from the start PCR tests were incapable of supplying reliable complete data? Was it Trump’s idea to mislead you and others on PCR testing failures? If Biden is really a serious dude on science and transparency, why wouldn’t he make this a campaign issue and promise truthfulness from his administration? Do Americans really care what the lies are or do they only care that it’s their guy doing the lying?

 

I think if I were Bob and got worse I would get tested again.
I think there is great value in the testing if for no other reason than to understand the hot spots.
I also don't believe in letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
And yes. I think Biden would have leveled with us from the beginning.

 

I also believe there is value in testing. I don’t believe in false advertising.

I also believe perfect should not be the enemy of the good. However, we have to deal with the reality that PCR Covid tests are not “good” by any metric.

Why isn’t the Biden campaign leveling with you now? The campaign has no problem criticizing the Trump administration. Is the Biden campaign unaware of this reality, being magnanimous towards Trump, or lying to you? What are the ramifications of those three possibilities?

 

I'm not sure what you are trying to say.
Would you reduce testing and make it take longer to get results?

 

Here’s your post I originally responded to.

Maybe I’ve misunderstood what you mean by “pure as ivory soap“. Clarify and I’ll amend my response if necessary.

In the meantime, what I’m trying to say is PCR testing was marketed to us by a certain demographic as being the savior of humanity. We were told everyone who wanted tested needed a test. There was weeping and gnashing of teeth because only symptomatic people were being tested. Well, the test we have only really works “well” (if you consider 20% failure “well”) 3 days after presentation of symptoms anyway. We’ve tried contact tracing in my state based on 24 hour test turnaround times. We have more cases now than before we had 24 hour tests and contact tracing. I don’t know if delaying test results helps because that exacerbates the problem of people who are asymptomatic and do get lucky and test hot continuing to spread the virus around while waiting for test results for days. That’s a very astute observation and question to ask though. As I said, it’s a catch 22 situation where the only solution that solves one problem without creating or exacerbating another problem is a better type of test.

If someone comes up with a rapid antigen test that can identify infections upwards of 90% of the time shortly after infection (and throughout the infectious period) I’d say ramp up testing. At this point, while it has some value, PCR testing is pretty much maxed out on usefulness. Look at tests per million data compared to deaths per million data for different countries and see if more tests really saved any lives. The US has administered 8 times as many tests per million as has South Korea. Look at the results that matter...deaths per million...and then make the case more testing is what we need.

I wouldn’t necessarily reduce testing. I think there is more awareness now in the medical/test administration community on timing of tests. That’s good, and can be leveraged, but only so much. I’m not opposed to testing. It beats not having testing at all. But it may be time to divert some money and other resources used in testing towards treatment research or something. And we certainly need to stop saying “if only we had more PCR tests things would get better“. We’ve come to the point of the old saying “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results “.

I’m just tired of the dishonesty on the issue. As I alluded to earlier, dishonesty in all forms in conducting, disseminating, and applying science is counter productive in the long run, even if there is perceived short term benefit politically/economically.

But the ramifications of dishonesty are probably not a big concern to society as a whole. Society has been conditioned to appeal to authority and has little interest in anything else. I’m one of the “unfortunate” souls who’s parents believed I should be “educated” to seek truth and understanding on my own, not be “trained” instead in who is and isn’t qualified to make decisions for me. It gets me into trouble here at PF, but I’m grateful to them for valuing education and thought over popularity and possessions. It’s allowed me a lot of peace, reduced stress, and ability to remain pragmatic on the science throughout this pandemic. I hope I can convince others to build some of that peace into their own lives. Buried under the numbers, theories, and complaints about dishonesty, the above bold sentence is what I’m really trying to say.

 

I was responding to this.

I was perhaps confused when you said this.

The horse is long out of the barn on contact tracing. You simply can't do it manually with 10's of thousands of cases. The time for tests was back when we had much fewer, like Korea. Although China seems to have done pretty good with massive testing. But even they jump on small outbreaks.
The testing now has value in pointing to what works and what doesn't work with mitigation or anyplace else statistics can be used.
We of course haven't done to good on this front because we seem to think we can go from all to nothing.

 

I took the ivory soap comment to mean you believed PCR tests to be accurate and a reliable source of data. I don’t believe they are at all “accurate” and believe they data they produce to be very substandard and incomplete.

My state had very few active cases when we began fast turnaround testing and contact tracing. It still didn’t work. Many parts of Europe had lots of testing and contact tracing coupled with very low infection rates (and even mask mandates) a few months ago and infections have exploded again.

China has administered 1/4 of the tests per million compared to the US. Their success (if you believe their numbers) has nothing to do with testing and more to do with the “jumping on outbreaks” as you say. Controlling spread is much easier in a totalitarian scenario. I’ll certainly agree to that.

Yes it has limited value. It is showing that mitigation strategies places like Germany and France were praised about for month’s didn’t really work. Infections there are higher than ever now even with severe mitigation strategies. The last hope for western civilization now seems to be an efficacious vaccine.

 

Only in official government talking points and your well washed brain.