I’m a nurse and there was a COVID exposure on my floor, so naturally the place went up in flames. I’ve already had it in March so I wasn’t worried since I’m a human being who creates an immune response following an infection as it has worked for the past millions of years for our species. My boss, who’s actually very based, did her manager job and said I should get tested and I told her no since often if you’ve had it you return a false positive (as has happened with several patients) and I have no symptoms. Plus there’s a universal mask policy in place anyway. She said that’s fine and that was that.
And then I get a call from the hospital to get tested and I tell the lady I had it in March. She says there’s “no proof” I have immunity and I tell her basic immunology says I do and I’m not getting tested, I have zero symptom, I dont know why we have these hysterical policies and Im not risking returning a false positive and being treated like a leper for two weeks. She said ok well I cant force you I said correct. And that was it. So we’ll see what happens next but most likely nothing will. Just like 99% of cases 🙃
I'm not in med, so not sure what this is..
But something I heard on the radio on the way back from the Gym is that some test sites were 'magnifying' or 'concentrating' samples on such an unheard of scale, beyond standard practice, that where normally a test would return negative, they're exponentially upping something with the samples to find fragments of the virus to return a positive.
They were saying, the person could have had it previously and recovered, could be a symptomatic, or immune.. and doing this was just creating a lot of false positives.
The test is run by PCR, polymerase chain reaction, which is a process that multiplies a DNA/RNA sample to the millions to have a visible/detectable size. It’s very a standard way to study DNA. What you heard at the gym sounds like a misunderstood explanation of the test. If there is no viral RNA present in the sample then there’s nothing to multiply.
According my own hospital’s infectious disease department, it is possible to have “viral remnants” left over long after an infection has been cleared. So this is why people who already were sick can test positive repeatedly after recovering because while the virus is neutralized or fragmented and cannot make you sick anymore, it’s physically still there.
Yea that sounds about right. Again, I don't fully remember the details, but the gist is there's supposed to be some standard amplification of the sample, 16-30x or so, I think it was something in that range?
But some labs were apparently doing 40-60x or so.
Supposedly, by multiplying those remnants by so much, it's showing results that are worse than reality.
New York Times had an article about that. 90% of positives should have been negatives.