TESTING OUR PATIENTS

By now everyone is really sick with all the COVID stuff. Many people, like us, have been vaccinated and had their booster shots. Others don’t want a vaccine they believe has not been properly tested. In addition, some of these people do not feel very vulnerable to COVID. This may be because they are younger and have no co-morbidity issues or it may even be because they had COVID and considered themselves immune.

Yet, none of this matters, we are still dealing with lockdowns, mask mandates, school closures and more. The President of the United States is scolding everyone to get vaccinated, but Senators Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren recently tested positive for COVID even though both were fully vaccinated, and both had their booster shot. This makes a lot of us wonder what is going on here.

It is increasingly difficult to have any confidence in what is being reported about COVID. For example, there are at least some people who believe that many of the COVID deaths are not “from” COVID, but rather “with” COVID. That at least some of these people would have died anyway. But more important, it is increasingly obvious that there are serious problems with the testing for COVID. The initial tests were awful, where they put a q tip down your nose pushed it down far enough to test your stomach contents and then jerked it back out. Then the next day, you would get the result. Now they have tests that give results in 15 minutes. But are they accurate? We know that Donald Trump had a COVID test, which was positive, and the same sample was later tested again, and it was negative. Which test was right? If they can’t figure out whether or not the President of the United States has COVID, how can we trust the results. Add in all the athletes who test positive on Monday, negative on Tuesday, and are cleared to play on Wednesday. Did they really have COVID in the first place?

Then there is the hysterical shrieking about the Omnicon Variant. But the only way to test for a COVID variant is to do a genome sequencing test. The following article in the Ohio Times explains the problem:

Delta variants can be detected by genome sequencing – Ohio News Time

It obviously takes a lot of time and effort and specialized equipment to identify a COVID variant. Now they are testing a lot of samples, but it still takes three days and special tests. So how do we know that Delta spread so fast and that Omnicom spreads even faster? The answer was in the last paragraph:

Dr. Ameshua Darja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Health Security Center, supports the Texas DSHS statement.

 

“For all purposes and purposes, if you are infected with COVID-19 in the United States today, you can consider it to be a delta mutant because it is the predominant version of the virus here. “

 

Let me translate: “If you test positive for COVID, even though the test clearly results in a lot of false positives, you are considered to have the Delta variant (now the Omnicon variant), even if the sample is not tested for the Delta or Omnicon variant, because that is what we expect.”

From the CDC website:

COVID Data Tracker Weekly Review | CDC

“*The median time from specimen collection to sequence data reporting is about 3 weeks. As a result, weighted estimates for the most recent few weeks may be unstable or unavailable. CDC’s Nowcast is a data projection tool that helps fill this gap by generating timely estimates of variant proportions for variants that are circulating in the United States. View Nowcast estimates on CDC’s COVID Data Tracker website on the Variant Proportions page.”

Translation: “We don’t have actual data, so we are guessing.”

Then anyone who dares hint at a problem is shouted down for spreading misinformation. My personal prediction is that we are surprisingly close to the end of the pandemic, not because anything has really changed, but because they are going to just stop testing everybody. Then, if they stop testing people, particularly people who have no symptoms, the sun will come out again. The NFL already figured this out and will no longer test NFL players who have been vaccinated and who have no symptoms. Sadly, they still refuse to recognize or even consider natural immunity, which is scientifically proven to be better than a vaccine.

The real problem here is that we rushed to develop tests and we rushed to develop vaccines and forgot the most crucial factor, to evaluate the results and make sure they are accurate. Instead, there was and is a rush to judgment based on questionable and sometimes hypothetical data which we are required to embrace as “following the science.”

I personally think if they stop testing people who have no symptoms, that the COVID panic would quickly fade away. If someone has symptoms, then test them so we know how to treat them. As of December 17, 2021, the number of people testing positive is 7.3% and most of them have no symptoms. 72.4% of the total US population has been vaccinated and 61.2% have been fully vaccinated. I think it is time to consider whether testing people with no symptoms for COVID is doing anything more than testing our patience when we should be testing our patients.

TDM