Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases • Hacker News Board

Re: Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

#191

Post by spookthesunset » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 7:07 PM UTC

gcanyon wrote: post #177

spookthesunset wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody gets a say in “lessons learned”. Not just a bunch of cherry picked doomsday epidemiologists. The “experts” were phenomenally myopic in their focus and would be in “lessons learned” as well. There is far more to life than the prevention of exactly one very specific respiratory illness. If you leave it to only the “experts” the only lessons you’ll get will be so narrowly focused as to be completely useless. “…

"experts" keep your plane in the air, your water safe to drink, your electricity supply consistent and steady, and on and on. Putting scare quotes around the word "experts" says more about you than the experts.

I'll use scare quotes all day long to describe the "experts" who pushed all that nonsense covid public policy. I didn't vote for them. They did nothing to earn my respect. I was just told I had to shut off my brain and follow their divine edicts no matter what nonsense they spouted. And if I didn't agree with what they said, I was labeled an alt-right wacko grandma killer.

These covid "experts" lied, manipulated the narrative, hid data, played politics, ignored data, and coerced media and big tech to play along. They silenced and attempted to discredit any colleague who went against their narrative--no matter how qualified or expert that colleague was.

I trust all kinds of experts from lawyers to water quality folks. Experts are always needed. But once you start lying and bending the truth the way the covid "experts" did... you lose the right to be considered an expert.

Nobody gets to tell me or anybody who gets to be an actual expert. That title is earned, not pushed by some authority figure and a bunch of hysterical people on social media.

I find it depressing how many people still buy into the narrative these "experts" pushed. It has nothing to do with tribalism or politics--these "experts" fucked up big time and caused incalculable damage to society that will haunt us all for decades to come. In short, Covid "experts" can rot in hell. And mark my words, what I just wrote will become the mainstream opinion soon enough.

Re: Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

#192

Post by mike_hearn » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 7:11 PM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #182

mike_hearn wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IFR was actually between 0.1% and 0.3% depending on what source you use. 1% was an early assumption back when there were only dozens of cases, but of course, back then only the most severe cases were being identified.

Without a source your assertion is valueless. Every covid denier claims it "only" killed a flu comparable number of people with zero evidence.

Where did I deny COVID killed people?

The best way to compute IFR is via serosurveys because those can pick up people who were infected but didn't get sick because their immune system fought it off without symptoms even developing.

Here's a serosurvey meta-study from 2022. It's more recent than when I last looked at this and computes an even lower value.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.11.22280963v...

"The median IFR was 0.0003% at 0-19 years, 0.003% at 20-29 years, 0.011% at 30-39 years, 0.035% at 40-49 years, 0.129% at 50-59 years, and 0.501% at 60-69 years."

It does vary heavily by country and age so it's not a very meaningful value, in some ways. It tells you more about the general state of health and healthcare in a place than the virus itself.

It's hard to compare this to the IFR of flu because flu has never had this scale of surveillance applied.

The COVID death rate and what it compares to is a very different and tricky topic. It's probably not worth getting into here. The thread is about COVID testing.

Re: Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

#193

Post by nradov » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 7:14 PM UTC

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #106

elzbardico wrote: post #32

Asymptomatic people have small viral loads. It is reasonable to suppose that a rapid test won't be sensible enough for those cases. And besides that, it makes really very little sense testing asymptomatic people.

* And besides that, it makes really very little sense testing asymptomatic people.* It only makes little sense if you don't really care about others. You can infect others with covid 48 hours before you have symptoms. If you know you've been exposed, why wouldn't you check? Plus, you can have symptoms without being infectious. Similar things with other viruses, too.

Every time we go out in public we are likely being exposed at some level. The virus is now endemic worldwide and will always be with us. Constant testing is impractical.

Re: Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

#194

Post by spondylosaurus » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 7:19 PM UTC

bamfly wrote: post #170

euix wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can long covid be considered post-viral fatigue? I remember being knocked out with Mononucleosis years ago and being tired out for over a month afterwards. Or is long Covid something entirely different?

It is my wholly-uninformed WAG hypothesis that lots of sorts of infections cause long-term changes and problems—we just don't usually make the connection between the illness and the later trouble. Like, if I had to bet money on it, I'd wager that "long flu" and even "long cold" are real things that happen at least sometimes, but just haven't gotten much attention (and, to be fair, they might also be less common, or l…

There's a link between EBV and multiple sclerosis!

Also, n=1, but I had a bout of bacterial laryngitis a few weeks ago (was briefly intubated for elective surgery—apparently this is a common side effect) and I'm still feeling a little breathless/cough-y despite having hacked up every last bit of phlegm and finished a full course of antibiotics. Doesn't seem shocking that my lungs would take a bit to recover, even if the bacteria in question have already cleared out.

Re: Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

#195

Post by Broken_Hippo » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 7:19 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #193

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* And besides that, it makes really very little sense testing asymptomatic people.* It only makes little sense if you don't really care about others. You can infect others with covid 48 hours before you have symptoms. If you know you've been exposed, why wouldn't you check? Plus, you can have symptoms without being infectious. Similar things with other viruses, too.

Every time we go out in public we are likely being exposed at some level. The virus is now endemic worldwide and will always be with us. Constant testing is impractical.

I never said that constant testing was practical. And "Every time we go out" isn't a known.

But sometimes folks tell you they caught it - folks in the office, friends, family - hence, the "Know you've been exposed" criteria. Then it is prudent to test. These are the only times that I've personally tested throughout the pandemic - but I'm in Norway, so I have probably encountered different sorts of restrictions than a lot of other readers.

And honestly: The real reason it isn't as prudent is because the virus isn't the beast it once was. Yes, it can still make you really sick, but it is much rarer than it once was.

Re: Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

#196

Post by psychphysic » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 7:20 PM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #176

psychphysic wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite useless if it only detected it in people who knew they were ill. Coupled with the fact most took precautions so we had mild cold and flu seasons. If you had a cough, fever, headache, loss of sense taste/smell take precautions. Don't come into the office. Guess what, that's precisely the people the test detected except it was delayed! Asymptomatic? Don't bother testing it probably just gives a false sense of sec…

Feeling very ill doesn't mean you have covid, and plenty of people had jobs that would not let them call out without a picture of a positive rapid test. Those jobs absolutely would have expected you to come in with a flu that could be spread to everyone else, because god forbid a business owner take a small haircut during a global emergency.

Then spill some orange juice on the test.

Even the kids knew that around here.

Re: Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

#197

Post by wanderingstan » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 7:22 PM UTC

yabones wrote: post #7

In my anecdotal experience, rapid tests are only really good for telling you if what you're sick with is covid or not, and barely even that. They will not give you a predictive result, and will not identify an early stage illness, only when you're at or near the peak of symptoms.

My anecdotal experience is the opposite: I was feeling pretty fine, just a little “off” which I attributed to a poor nights sleep. Took a rapid Covid test because I was about to meet my elderly parents. Surprise! It’s Covid. Real symptoms didn’t kick in for another 8 hours, peak symptoms for another 2 days.

Re: Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

#198

Post by kbelder » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 7:29 PM UTC

pama wrote: post #70

If anyone cares to increase the resolution of a rapid test, I recommend using Fiji and treating the image of the test strip like an antibody blot image and run the quantitative gel analysis (easy to find info on the web). The software integrates the signal along the direction of the strip, correcting for lighting conditions, and the resulting single curve can clarify a little bump well before (or after) the viral loa…

Isn't this just shifting the balance between false negatives and false positives?

Re: Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

#199

Post by elzbardico » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 7:40 PM UTC

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #106

elzbardico wrote: post #32

Asymptomatic people have small viral loads. It is reasonable to suppose that a rapid test won't be sensible enough for those cases. And besides that, it makes really very little sense testing asymptomatic people.

* And besides that, it makes really very little sense testing asymptomatic people.* It only makes little sense if you don't really care about others. You can infect others with covid 48 hours before you have symptoms. If you know you've been exposed, why wouldn't you check? Plus, you can have symptoms without being infectious. Similar things with other viruses, too.

It is very hard to be contagious if you are not symptomatic for a viral infection that is airborne.

Just think about it, and you'll figure out why.

You need lots of cell death and viral replication to cough up enough virions to be a danger.

Re: Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

#200

Post by spookthesunset » Thu, Jul 13, 2023, 7:41 PM UTC

gcanyon wrote: post #180

mike_hearn wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Quarantining you at home, for example, makes sense when you're dealing with a deadly disease Intuitively yes, in reality no. It was known by March 2020 that quarantines had no effect because of the outcome of trying it on the Diamond Princess, a sealed environment where quarantine could be perfectly enforced. That didn't stop SARS-CoV-2 spreading between cabins and causing COVID apparently at random, i.e. it'd prop…

Again, there are people who get paid to spend all their time determining whether, for example, overestimation is worse or underestimation is. It is an absolute certainty that the response to covid was suboptimal. Apart from how complex the situation and the response was, just given that responses varied widely from region to region guarantees that most were not perfect. But while it's certainly possible to nitpick so…

> It seems that you're not only aware, you think your tone is justified

I encourage you to play the other side of this argument for a while. I've been called all kinds of absolutely awful things by people I used to respect. Why? Because I dared to question or examine things myself. I guess I was just expected to shut up and listen to "the experts" even if I found their edicts to be completely useless, unethical, immoral, and not even close to being driven by data. I've been banned, blocked, and called "dangerous" just for linking to public data hosted on a government website.

Somewhere I read "consensus"... well, there was absolutely no consensus. Any critic, no matter how qualified, was immediately discredited by those in power. Covid policy was completely one-sided the entire time.

So, I'm kinda sorry but not really sorry about my tone. Those of us who had to suffer through 3 years of hell thanks to "the experts" intentionally painting us as heartless alt-right grandma killers... well we are kinda pissed. We've all heard every argument you write. We heard it for three years. And we believe it is wrong; ethically, morally, and legally.

And we have a complete right to that opinion. Because public policy is not based on "experts" or "the science" but on opinion and values. And quite frankly, the values that drove the lockdowns and all the other nonsense covid theater are, in my opinion, bad...even evil.

The values that drove lockdowns and such expose some of the absolute worst aspects of humanity--arrogance, hubris, and tribalism. Modern humans think they are way more advanced than people thousands of years ago, but based on our reactions to covid, I'd say we have the same archaic superstitions our ancestors had back when we all lived in caves.

Anyway, I hope this helps you understand where those of us with a difference of opinion come from.