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Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

nature.com

21–30 of 236 posts

Re: Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

#21
post #4

BTW, what does this even mean: "But if the tests work much better when taken three times over the course of several days."

Multiple attempts at a 10% success rate increase the success rate.

The math is more intuitive if you say it decreases the failure rate. i.e. if you try something with a 10% success rate 3 times, your odds are 1 - (0.9 ^ 3) = 27.1% chance of success.

Re: Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The authors say that an informational campaign about the proper way to take rapid tests might help to preserve public confidence in the tests’ utility.” Why do we have to spend tax payer money for a campaign to try and force people to care about the utility of a product that can't accurately detect a symptomless virus. Honestly starting to forget it was ever even a thing.

I had COVID a few weeks ago. You will remember.

My wife's been battling long COVID for nine months now. She definitely remembers.

Re: Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

#24
post #6

Is that really a problem if asymptomatic cases are less infectious and do not cause much issues to the carrier? (This is a question, not a statement)

The point of the test is to tell the carrier if they should isolate to slow the spread - if you're asymptomatic today, take the test, get a negative, go to work for the week, it's as if you didn't do the test.

It's not to begin treatment. So it is a pretty big problem!

Re: Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

#25

I remember early on that they were advertised as just confirming COVID when you were at the height of symptoms. Then we got flooded with using them all the time and expectations of much more. What happened?

people need to go to parties and have some vague notion that they aren't willfully spreading raging covid to everyone.

Re: Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

#27
post #16
post #8

Duh, they only detect levels of viral load sufficient to make a person infectious, around 1e6 RNA copies per cc of fluid. And viral load tends to peak somewhere in the 1e10 to 1e14 range, people at 1e6 really have to work at coughing directly on to growth plates to create a sample. Back in the early days of Covid-19 people didn't typically begin displaying symptoms visible without an x-ray until they'd nearly reach t…

Indeed, it appears that this is somewhat redundant. A majority, if not all, of the rapid tests I have used explicitly caution against taking one in the absence of symptoms, as it is expected to yield negligible results.

I got stuck in the United States, was not allowed to fly back home until I got a negative result on a rapid test. It still took a week to test negative after I'd been symptom free.

Re: Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

#28
My pet theory is the vaccine is good at creating populations that have asymptomatic and subclinical experiences with the disease and that probably contributes to spread because otherwise those people would've stayed home if they were sicker. This seems to confirm that it even does this to the rapid tests.

Re: Rapid Covid tests miss 90% of asymptomatic cases

#29

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/covid-19-spread-from-deer/ If wild animals are regularly spreading Covid to humans, this plus asymptomatic cases means zero Covid strategies never had a chance of working indefinitely.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-39782-x
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