Speaking of special advisors:
EDIT: Monty Python edition:
Yup! That’s the one. What a silly twat eh?
I prefer him running away to running anything important.
Entirely agree, it’s just i saw that and thought - ‘rat’, ‘sinking’ and ‘ship’. In this case plague ship.
Like his hero Pericles, will he die from this plague…
I’ll try to answer some of your questions.
The test itself can be performed pretty quickly. If you would just have your sample taken and directly processed, you could have the results maybe some three hours later.
However, usually your sample gets taken. Then it needs to be prepared for shipping and registered, shipped, delivered, the registration processed, and the sample processed. Depending on where you are and how quickly this can be done, this might mean more than two days before the lab even starts processing. Samples aren’t run one by one, but a full of samples run might, e.g., start in the afternoon. If your sample arrived to late, it will run the next day if there aren’t many others already queued up. Then the results come in, someone has to look at them and, again, register the results - depending on your national law e.g. with the local health authorities. I suppose in some legislations that’s it, and the authorities will have to process the registered result and reach out to you to put you under quarantine or send you a clearance. (Sidenote: This can take days or even two weeks even in Germany, which has good capacities for testing. The local Gesundheitsämter (health authorities) are overwhelmed with the amount of stuff they currently have to deal with. I know first hand from a friend who got quarantined, and a neighbour who works for the Gesundheitsamt.)
If you have direct access, as I assume you probably should have if you are running a countries policies, then testing is a matter of one or two days. If not, it depends very much on where and when you are.
Just for the record, in several countries, you only can get tested directly if you have been to a specific area, or had direct contact to someone who already has contracted Covid-19. Even several mild symptoms won’t get you tested if you are not displaying fever.
For the record, as I assume most people still do not know:
Tests can also be done wrong. In the beginning of the infection, and even prior to symptoms, the virus is reportedly replicating in the throat. A swipe must be taken from the back of your throat behind your soft palate. This is difficult and painful. It can be done through the nose or the mouth, but has to be done right or you don’t have enough tissue on the swipe. The virus also replicates in the lung, especially after the first days of the infection. (This is was causes more severe symptoms, and your immune system firing up its response leads to the pneumonia which might kill you.) Replication in the throat may completely stop, so a sample from the throat may turn out negative (however, the PCR has a high sensitivity, so it can also be positive). That is why a) CT scans are used and b) tests are then performed using test material from your lung. Many people cannot cough up enough material, and it again may not contain enough tissue, hence intubation and suction of material from the glottis (NB: if I remember that point correctly) is needed.
This all isn’t a walk in the park. It hurts, it needs trained medical personnel which is protected. It needs lab capacities, quick transport, and proper procedure and processing of data. It binds many resources. And it can be botched on so many levels.
I agree that in many countries, especially the US, the authorities’ response to this crisis is on a scale in the areas of far from ideal to what the holy mother of fucks are you dumbwits doing.
But in all outrage, let us please, pretty please step back every now and then and try to remember that this is a complex and ever so fast developing situation and we are in this together. Even the dumbwits may, just may, deserve some benefit of doubt at some points because noone of us has the full picture.
That said, holy mother of fucks, what a band of dumbwits.
Not unless they had advance sample versions of the antibody home test kit, which seems doubtful.
Yet again, it looks like Stupid Lake has breached the dam.
Brexit was a self isolated tentative,
I guess he finally understood the meaning of it.
Like someone in the Twitter thread commented - you’d think he’d stay to test this herd immunity thing, but…
I don’t catch your drift? Unless? Why unless?
(Just FTR, assuming you know but as a service for anybody scrolling by: antibody tests are not for determining if you are infected, but if you have been infected in the past, i.e. if you already have antibodies against a (likely: cured) infection. It’s important to find out how many asymptomatic infections exist, so we can estimate how long it might take for reaching herd immunity.)
If he started having symptoms, they could give him the antibody test and know in 10 minutes if it’s COVID-19. He’d been infected (and spreading) for a week. The symptoms start when the immune system fights back, so he’d probably be positive on the test – assuming that they had any, and when the antibodies appear in the cycle in quantities to trip the test.
They say that the antibody test is for detecting people who have had it in the past, but I think the truth table of the tests should look like this:
(Bah, I’m not going to fix the spelling.) People will start in the upper left, go down, across, then up to the upper right. How long people stay in the lower right, especially the asymptomatic, would be the problem.
It’s not that easy!
There are also different reactions of the immune system, and very individual immune responses. Additionally, the antibody tests can only detect what specific antibodies they are tailored to, so if your immune system not yet produces the specific type the specific test detects, your test may turn out negative.
Also, there are massive differences in sensitivity between different tests, and cross-checked tests are in lab trial as I write this.
I don’t want to accuse you of providing false info, by the way. I’m no immunologist myself, lectures I heard two decades ago also didn’t stick. But I know enough to say that your info isn’t accurate.
Also, Christian Drosten, head virologist of the Charité and Corona virus specialist, addressed this matter in his podcast three days ago. There are transcripts, and they might be worth translating.
The episode in question can be found here:
People like him will likely have barely any symptoms and come out of it saying it was no big deal and doesn’t understand all the fuss.
Because this universe is a dick.
People said there was no silver lining…