I would argue that Trump and his team have saved millions of lives.
Especially with his actions of banking travel from China and then later Europe and Brazil. I found it a bit odd though that Britian was exempt in the beginning, considering it was pretty sure over though.
Compare that to the response of Democrats such as Cuomo who said people should still go out that it wasn't a big deal. And the vodka drinker Pelosi who said people should go visit Chinatown in San Fran Sicko.
During this time, Trump has had to deal with a very hostile and corrupt media that wanted to Blake every death on him, when he has been doing everything in his power to fight the WuFlu.
I believe in January he ordered flights to stop from China and soon after set up the task force, with no less than the VP to be in charge of it.
You are making an argument from authority, and the cases you are seeing are biased towards the severe presentations requiring hospitalization. In the context of severe symptoms, the PPV of pcr certainly goes up, but the main point of the article is that there is no gold standard from which to judge the accuracy of the test because the symptoms of covid overlap with many other respiratory illnesses, and it lacks pathognomonic features. Also, the pcr test amplifies rna from benign coronaviruses that share sequences with covid which would qualify as a FP. These viruses are ubiquitous in the environment. In addition many protocols amplify the sample so many times that the noise to signal ratio is inappropriately high as the creator of pcr has said. It also does nothing to tell you what a person's viral load is or even if there is active replication. How did a durian, goat, papaya, and bird test positive? Should fruits be socially distanced?
This is doubly silly - for two reasons. One, in any counterargument, you will be citing someone else's information (usually with a link to a website, which is what you did with global research) without being able to test it yourself. Two, because I gave the rationale why the logic of the source you cited was erroneous.
If we were talking about back in early April and May, you would be correct. That would be because most people were avoiding going to the hospital unless they really had to. That isn't the case at all now. People are showing up for testing because just because their coworker was sent home with some sickness and they are worried they might have it.
This is why we use differential diagnoses. Presentation gives us a very good idea of what the possibilities are. There are a lot of things that lack any one specific finding, but show up as a cluster of symptoms. If Covid-19 is significantly impacting the person's breathing, the CT or Xray is usually distinct. Rule outs also help us distinguish what disease or condition is NOT affecting you at the moment
I didn't mention it in the post you just replied to, but our facilities aren't using the antibody tests, because those have shown no consistent reliability from any of the sources we have tried.
There are many tests that amplify the original sample. A blood culture that takes a couple days before resulting gives the bacteria a chance to grow and multiply. For example, the amplification that tells us whether a patient has gram positive anaerobic cocci clusters doesn't mean the test is inaccurate. It gives us a better idea of what organisms are possibly causing a patient's sickness.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC121377/
It isn't about the signal to noise ratio. We are just looking for various words in the signal. If the word shows up, we know we have a match. One of the things that we learned very early was that people that came in sick with Covid-19 almost never have the flu at the same time. People that came in sick with the flu almost never had Covid-19 at the same time. They might later acquire them, but the tests weren't showing overlap. The same was true with Covid and RSV or Strep. Why is this relevant? If you went into a hospital sick when Covid was at its peak, and thee were very limited Covid-19 test kits, providers might use one of the other viral tests to rule out Covid as your source of illness, even without a Covid test.
I can't vouch for the accuracy of various PCR testing used outside of our facilities (it is a very sizable group of hospitals though). I do know, and can vouch that early on, there were a lot of faulty PCR tests used in other facilities. Throughout repeated verification efforts, the tests we were using never fell into the false positive problem area. False negatives (clinically proven) were a a problem area due to the insensitivity of the tests. We were fortunate enough to work hand in hand with one of the places developing the tests.
Yesterday was a slow day, and I was personally responsible for only 12 Covid-19 tests. Of the ones I did the previous week (moderately busy) only two came back positive and both patients were at home doing well with over the counter medications.
The disease is unpredictable compared to many other diseases, but at this point in time we've got a fairly good handle on how it can present. Of the ones I tested yesterday, I expect three will test positive, even though their symptoms don't match up well with typical symptom checker lists. I could be wrong, and will learn from the results either way and adjust my practice accordingly. It is why they call it practicing medicine. An awful lot of it depends on the specific person who is sick, and how they are responding to their illness. That is something no blog, algorithm or individual test can tell you ahead of time.