
PROPER TEST USE = FEWER CASES, JUST IN TIME
On January 20, 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a little-noticed technical report that calls into question statistics regarding the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
At the heart of all the data on COVID-19 cases is the reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test, which can detect the virus in nasal swabs.
The test is used, sensibly, to guide medical treatment for patients who display COVID-19 symptoms. Less sensibly, it was used to identify people with no symptoms at all as positive “cases”.
The WHO’s guidance on the RT-PCR test emphasizes two things that have long been known in the scientific literature and public health practice but inexplicably ignored in COVID policy for almost a year.
First, they point out that a positive COVID test does not necessarily mean that someone has any capacity of infecting someone else with the virus.
Therefore, it instructs laboratories to report a key statistic that indicates how likely a positive test result actually constitutes infectious COVID-19. And second, the WHO warns against relying on a single test for patients without clinical COVID-19 symptoms.
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/536539-appropriate-use-of-pcr-needed-for-a-focused-response-to-pandemic