Dammit!
Anecdotally this matches up with some recent experience in my family. My brother-in-law started feeling unwell last Friday. He works for a company that makes the antigen tests so he had several on hand. He got false negatives on Friday and Saturday, finally testing positive on Monday. I’ll bet there are many, many people out there that got one or even two false-negative antigen tests like him and proceeded with life assuming they must not have covid.
I was wondering why Jen hasn’t had to deal with Peter Doocy lately.
Yesterday, Victoria had 21,727 new cases confirmed.
Today, Victoria had 51356 reported.
It’s not quite as bad as it looks, but the reasons why are almost worse.
That’s not more than double the amount of cases detected just in the last day, that’s because the reports now include PCRs and the results of reported RATs, and batches up the last week’s worth of reported positive RATs.
Which is still not good. It’s also been pointed out that because in that time there was still an expectation of a PCR followups to confirm a RAT, then there will be doubleups, who appear in the PCR and the RAT results.
But still… why are we including self-reports now? Because 1) the PCR testers are overloaded. The official rules now say that you basically already have to be sick to even get in line for a PCR, and the lines go for hours, and close early. People report getting to a testing site at 6:30am for an 8:30am start, and being turned away because the line’s already at capacity. And batching doesn’t save time any more. And batch reagents are running out, so they have to be done manually, so mistakes happen more often. And there are more and more pathology workers getting sick or going into isolation.
So that’s why we have to count RAT results, just to have some idea what scale the problem is.
But then, the RATs are completely unobtainable unless you are staggeringly lucky, and even then if you can get one for as little as $15 each, you’re even luckier. #MakeThemFreeDickhead has apparently been trending on twitter for days. (The “dickhead” in question, of course, being Smirko the Prime Minister.) Making them more affordable would be good, but for that to be meaningful, they have to be available, which they are not. Which means even those people who do want take a test (“I only have the one, I’d better make sure I only take it when I’m sure I’m sick”, or “If I take it and it’s positive, it’ll screw up everything for everyone, so I’ll just assume it’s just a cold”), they more often than not can’t take one.
It is, very shortly, going to be the case that most of the reported cases will be from RATs, and because of the known supply problems, we know for a fact that it will be massively underreported.
The Victorian government is doing the best it can with the tools it’s got available. But those years of lockdown have now been pissed up against a wall by decisions made by the NSW and Federal governments.
I guess the folks who run E3 knew this was coming and avoided doing a big in person event to avoid photos and video like this
About 90% of COVID-19 patients in some of Pa.’s hardest-hit hospitals are unvaccinated
“Every day, there are patients dying in our hospitals who really don’t need to die,” said one south-central Pennsylvania hospital leader.
This asshole
You know, I would not be surprised if Roger Federer would shortly come out in public support of this arsehole. (Federer has an anthroposophical background.)
Elite athletes looking to impair their oxygen capacity permanently. Did he ask someone to hold his beer?
Matches with my cousin’s experience as well. She still self isolated because it might have been the flu and she didn’t want her 85 year old grandma to possibly be exposed to the flu, but still, 2 negative RATs and then a positive PCR test (in the olden days 3 weeks back when you could get a PCR test in BC).
Another scary development related to that: last night I was talking to my doctor sister who was telling me that at her hospital they recently made a switch so that all the testing that’s done in their ER is now being done with antigen tests to save time and money. You can bet that folks who receive a negative test at a hospital will assume that they really are negative.
