George Rebane
Now there are not enough tests, and the desired rapid tests are really unreliable, and regardless of test results, it is probably safer to let Omicron spread than mess with it, if you’re not in one of those vulnerable classes, and more to come. All this on top of the simple fact that making decisions on just ‘test positivity’ has always been a non-starter (as I’ve shown in these pages).
Today we read in the 11jan22 WSJ (here) that the popular home rapid tests may be even more unreliable in detecting Delta and other non-Omicron variants of the disease. And timing is very important in when the test is taken – don’t do it too early, let the symptoms cook for a couple or three days (then what do you do?), and don’t be eager to believe negative test results, and … .
The best sensitivities of ‘properly applied’ tests yield sensitivities of 85-95% – that’s the probability of getting a ‘test positive’ given you have the disease. This, of course, means that out of every 100 diseased and infectious individuals, the test will come back negative for 5 to 15 of them. These are then free to party or attend other sardine-packed events or transports. The specificity of tests are not even mentioned; apparently they are of no concern. You may recall that a test’s specificity is the probability getting ‘test negative’, given you don’t have the disease. Test specificities are usually lower than sensitivities. That means that tests also quarantine a lot more people than actually have the malady.
Then there’s the whole question of managing the spread of Covid. In ‘Slow the spread? Speeding it may be safer’ the authors present data and argue that “the Omicron variant is spreading across the globe, but so far the strain appears to be less deadly than its predecessors. That’s good news, but here’s a risk that policy makers in every country should appreciate: Policies designed to slow the spread of Omicron may end up creating a supervariant that is more infectious, more virulent and more resistant to vaccines. That would be a man-made disaster.”
This all has to do with some very sophisticated technical notions of factors affecting dispersion known as ‘antigenic drift’ and ‘antigenic shift’. Drift is a slow mechanism by which a virus changes, which then allows a host’s immune system to successfully suppress viruses which have only slightly modified themselves from the successfully vaxxed or naturally inhibited variants. Letting drift occur – i.e. speeding dispersion – has a higher probability of stopping all such variants before they find ways to change even more into versions for which there is no effective vaccine.
Shift then is the process by which the virus can pile up multiple changes to its genome and then emerge as having gone through a “discontinuous quantum leap from one antigen (or set of antigens) to a very different antigen (or set of antigens). New viral strains—such as those that jump from one species to another—tend to emerge from antigenic shift.”
This is bad because “vaccinated and naturally immune people can revamp their immune response to new viral strains created by antigenic drift. Yet social distancing and masking increase the risk of vaccine-resistant strains from antigenic shift by minimizing opportunities for the vaccinated and naturally immune to tailor their immune responses through periodic exposures to incrementally ‘drifted’ variants.”
This reality is complex stuff, and you’ll hear nothing about it from the government’s Faucis and Walenskys. All that comes down to us are articles of faith about more testing being somehow better than less testing. But two years into C19, and no one has yet to state a cogent or coherent objective for widespread testing. Most certainly no reasonable case has been made that testing somehow reduces the virulence, morbidity, or mortality of Covid. So there you have it. The testing confusion grows, and the world’s population has abandoned all critical thought and become lemmings led to the altar of testing to worship a rite, the blessings of which no one is aware. Today we do testing simply for the sake of testing because it makes us feel good. Sometimes placebos work.
rebanesruminations.com 
Leave a comment