How testing works…

This is an understandable article on what COVID-19 testing can and can not accomplish, and its very real limitations.  Most of those running about screeching “TESTING! TESTING!” don’t understand what the test can show,  much less what it means.   Not even virologists can say with certainty that having had the disease makes you immune to it, but the current view is that antibodies don’t recognize the whole virus.  Each antibody,  essentially trained to recognize a piece of a puzzle but not the whole,  binds only to a small piece of the virus.  Antibodies made by a person previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 may not recognize the parts of the virus used in a particular diagnostic lab test.   Or perhaps  the person’s immune system needed to develop only a small amount of antibodies,  beneath the level that a test could detect.   In either case, the test would show that the person didn’t have antibodies to SARS-CoV-2,  delivering a “false-negative” result.  Similar mechanisms could present a “false positive” result.  They are working with plasma from patients who recovered or showed no symptoms as a treatment for the seriously ill.   They are hoping that the combined antibodies will overwhelm the virus.

Testing is good for statistics.  It is helpful to know how many people were infected,  how many were asymptomatic,  how many cases were mild,  how many were serious, and  how many proved fatal.  The latter category will be tricky, as doctors are being urged to claim COVID-19 as the cause of death,  when an underlying health problem  actually caused the death of an infected patient.  We went through this same numbers game with HIV/AIDS, and to a lesser extent Ebola and other pandemics.  Medical facilities and health charities and governments get more more money if they have a pandemic and higher death rates.   If somebody lays some numbers on you,  ask if the patients died WITH or FROM COVID-19.  It makes a very large difference.

Some people have very robust immune systems.   I am one of them,  having nursed family members through rotavirus and norovirus,  neither of which I caught.   I have not had a cold in over 50 years,  and have never had seasonal flu.  I skipped the customary childhood diseases,  and my childhood was so long ago that they had few vaccines against them.  I can remember being given a sugar cube with Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine on it.  Remember that  polio was  never the raging epidemic portrayed in the media  (sound familiar?) .   Even during its height in the 1940’s and ’50’s,  ten times as many children died in accidents and three times as many succumbed to cancer.   It was still a very scary disease.  So is COVID-19,  but virologists and researchers are hard at work to learn how to defeat it.   They will succeed in at least taming it,  if not destroying it.

The experts don’t know it all, and are quite reluctant to admit how much they don’t know.    Take what they say with a large grain of alt and apply your own logic and common sense.   Be of good cheer and stay vigilant and prepared against those who are trying to use this crisis to destroy the economy and make you permanently dependent on the government for survival.  In the end,  I think we will find that the  lock-downs are  producing more deaths than the disease it is supposed to protect us against.