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Personal Wuhan Coronavirus Update
I received this text from my best friend Friday morning:
Two nights ago I felt restless and slept fitfully. Yesterday afternoon I noticed a sore throat. Last night, when I went to bed, I was chilled, and woke up every hour or so in a cold sweat. At that time I also noticed the headache. This morning I am drifting in and out of sleep, I ache all over, and I have a slight cough. I’ve canceled today’s jobs, and am hoping to recover over the weekend.
It seems likely that he and his wife have the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Their grown son received a positive test result a day or two after Thanksgiving, and the family spent Thanksgiving together, unmasked, un-distanced. His wife and their son and daughter-in-law have been mildly ill since the holiday.
I responded as would be expected, with a mixture of sympathy and gallows humor. He’s in his mid-50s, the odds that he and his wife will recover are excellent, and I’m not really worried about them.
My friend, who is also my younger brother, shares with me a skepticism about the Wuhan coronavirus and America’s response to it. We both think that the lockdowns should end – should have ended months ago. We think this disease, as bad as it is, isn’t all that bad, and that Americans need to get back to work. Life isn’t and can’t be risk-free, and the risk of this virus isn’t that great for most of us.
But most of all, we share a belief that Americans should be free, even though being free isn’t as safe as being under house arrest. We’ve had most of a year to deal with this thing, to build care capacity and to secure the relatively small portion of the population for whom this represents a serious danger. Instead, we chose to panic and to cower, to destroy the economy, and to inflict untold collateral damage on America’s families. We have lived, for nine months, under the capricious mismanagement of fearful and incompetent governors and hand-wringing technocrats.
On January 1, a new year begins. I hope and expect Americans to refuse to live through 2021 as we have half-lived through 2020.
Published in General
I dunno. Conservatives claim to be opposed to the deep state, or the swamp, or whatever you want to call it. But the deep state is refusing to authorize the sale of at-home antigen tests that could help people manage this epidemic without such severe government intervention as we’ve been having. And conservatives could care less. Not even the people who don’t want government injections care. So we’ll probably get what we deserve.
Wishing the best for your brother.
My 66 yr old brother and his 50 yr old wife had it a couple of months ago (their 13 yr old daughter did not). His was severe, but not hospital severe, and hers was mild. He says he does occasionally still have shortness of breath. But he had no major underlying health conditions (other than advanced age, ha,ha – and I’m older).
Prayers headed his way.
https://rushbabe49.com/2020/11/30/the-lockdowns-will-continue-until-morale-improves-or-until-all-washington-state-residents-are-enslaved/
If the son got his result a day or two after Thanksgiving, he most likely got tested before Thanksgiving. It would be interesting to know why he got a test.
In many parts of the U.S. it takes several days to get a test result. A lot of good that does, if you don’t want to spread the infection to your family and associates. By the time you get your test result, you’re probably past your peak of infectiousness.
When I got my test result in early November it was only 36 hours after I got tested. That’s pretty good, but most labs and health systems aren’t turning them around that quickly. I’ve heard of one that is turning them around more quickly than that, but even that isn’t good enough.
In my case, I came down with a fever Saturday night and didn’t get the test result until Wednesday evening. I had to wait until Monday to get in touch with a triage nurse, and the earliest appointment she could make for me to get a drive-up test was Tuesday morning. I got the test results online late Wednesday evening. If I had had covid, I still would have been past peak infectiousness by the time I got my test results. (I isolated myself as soon as I came down with a fever. I didn’t really think it was covid (it wasn’t) but I needed to be sure.)
With rapid, at-home antigen tests, none of this would be necessary. If we had rapid, at-home antigen tests, our youngest son could safely come to visit at Christmastime without even quarantining himself for a few days. (We’re especially concerned about keeping his mother from getting covid.)
But the deep state FDA is keeping those tests from being made readily available, and conservatives are not interested. It seems they’d rather complain about government oppression than let people take the initiative to look after their own health without such oppressive measures. They’d rather complain about masks than make masks less necessary.
These tests are now being used in some countries, such as Slovakia, but Slovakia is doing it all wrong. The government in Slovakia is administering the tests, and wants all citizens of the entire country to come to testing centers to get tested. Each of four million people is supposed to go to a testing center to get tested, and then get results in 30 minutes. If positive, they are supposed to quarantine at home or in a government-provided quarantine space.
It’s not clear that Slovakia really has the logistics worked out for such a massive test. And it sounds as though it’s a one-time test. What is needed are affordable tests that can be done at regular intervals or as needed, when needed, at home, or at work or school.
I blame control-freaking leftists for blocking the availability of these tests, and I blame Ricochet for not caring. There is one epidemiologist on Biden’s team who is in love with his plans for an extreme lockdown. But that same epidemiologist has been badmouthing and sneering at these antigen tests for the past several months. And Ricochet isn’t interested.
Here in Virginia, if I want a Covid test and claim any of a number of justifying circumstances, I can very quickly arrange a test from my pharmacist on a drive-thru basis. Given that the pricier tests have been very suspect in their accuracy, I don’t know that I would even want to bother with the home version.
The situation will continue until the Biden administration / team / experts / press can mold the future fading of the virus into a “Biden success” story.
I’ll confess to being unaware, but not uninterested. I had no idea such a test was a possibility yet. Which pharma co makes it and what is the rationale being asserted for it not being made available?
How would you have managed your symptoms and life events (seeing your son) if there were no “test” for this virus? I’m in the skeptical camp which wonders How reliable is a Test when everyone gets 100%? I expect you’d have told everyone you’re cruddy and to stay away. And you didn’t want company anyway. And they would have decided on their own.
I’m sympathetic to your viewpoint, Henry. Unfortunately, the casualties from COVID within our circle are stacking up. It doesn’t justify lockdowns. It just sucks.
I want a new Great Wall of China — to wall them inside!
The home version is better if you want to test for infectiousness. The pricier PCR tests are very accurate at determining whether or not you have or have had covid, but that’s not always what you want to know. Often it’s not. If you want to know whether it’s safe for you to go to work or to the parents’ Thanksgiving dinner, it’s not. If Ct results were reported, they would be more useful for this purpose, but those results aren’t provided. The PCR tests aren’t timely enough, and even if they were they don’t tell you about infectiousness. If, on the other hand, you want to know if this nagging cough and shortage of breath you have was caused by Covid, they’re the gold standard.
Newspaper reporters have been very unintelligent about understanding the difference, and have spread some misleading information. My suspicion is that before finishing their stories they call up one of the lockdown-loving epidemiologists to check their facts, and the lockdown-loving epidemiologist, instead of explaining this difference, pooh-poohs the antigen tests leading the whole story off the trail. Or maybe that’s not how it works. Maybe the news reporters at the WSJ and NYT just aren’t intelligent enough to understand the science. But that much of the science isn’t that difficult. Even news reporters should be able to get it, if they take the time. Of course, they work under deadline pressure. But this is Junior High level material. I did see one (1) popular press article in Scientific American that groked the difference and explained it well, but that’s a rarity.
Although the home version is very accurate at telling you whether you’re infectious, there are a small number of false positives. Maybe no more than with the PCR test, but there will be some. There are two ideas about what to do about them.
One is to confirm each positive result with a PCR test. That should probably be done regardless, but that takes time and isn’t helpful in knowing whether you should send your kids to school today or go to the family Christmas dinner.
Dr. Michael Mina proposes something else, which probably requires more government involvement than the free market will easily take care of. There are several versions of these antigen tests out there, all of which are pretty good. (There are also some duds, and the FDA should keep those off the market.) The good ones each work slightly differently.
Dr. Mina proposes that each package of ten or a dozen antigen strips include one (or two) of another brand, to be used as a rapid confirmatory test. It’s extremely unlikely that a false positive on test A will also produce a false positive on test B. The problem is each type of test is from a different drug company, and those companies compete with each other. They wouldn’t easily cooperate with their competitors on producing a package like that without some government “encouragement”.
And to elect the pro-China candidate that has a problem with invading personal space.
I am told there are several pharmas that make these tests. I don’t have a list handy, but I’ll see if I can come up with one. I might take the easy way out and ask Dr. Mina’s lab if there is a list.
The FDA has made some of them available for “emergency” use under doctor’s supervision. It has also, as of mid-November, made one at-home antigen test available, but it’s a moderately pricy package involving reagents and not really the answer for mass availability and use.
Some of the rationales that have been given for not making them available should be a red flag for conservatives.
One is of the “people can’t handle the information” variety, such as was given for home pregnancy tests and HIV tests before they were finally made available.
Some say that if people have negative results they will have false confidence and won’t wear masks and observe all the other social distancing and lockdown regulations. I would ask, how is that different from the current situation? Maybe these tests shouldn’t completely do away with the need for other measures, but they should certainly mitigate the need. And speaking from a public health perspective, the purpose is to slow down the spread of the disease to bring it under control. Yes, there will be mistakes, but the idea is to reduce those to a small enough number to bring the epidemic under control and reduce the spread.
Some people think false positives would send too many people to get confirmatory PCR tests and overwhelm the system. But I don’t think that reason would hold up now that the country has ramped up its PCR testing capacity.
Some say that if people don’t do their tests under medical supervision, they won’t report their results to the authorities, who then won’t have the data they need to study this epidemic. I would point out that people who are positive will be getting PCR tests at some point, and the researchers will still be getting those data. They won’t be getting data on all the negatives, but as things stand now researchers aren’t getting all the data anyway. They aren’t getting the Ct values associated with PCR tests, so the data they get from those are of limited value anyway. It’s somewhat of a mystery, even to researchers, why Ct values aren’t made available. I wonder if it has something to do with HIPAA. Whatever the case, I think it’s a pretty lame reason. There is no way our medical system can supervise a system that would have the whole population doing a test once or twice a week, anyway. So why keep people from getting that information about infectiousness for themselves?
Maybe there are other reasons, but those are some I’ve read and heard.
Oh, some have pointed out that the Trump White House was getting rapid antigen tests (under medical supervision) and look what happened there. Dr. Mina responds that it’s an example that worked. There was a lot of person-to-person contact in the White House, and look at how long it took before some people got coronavirus. We got the desired slowdown in transmission. There was also an MIT article that pointed out that Trump himself didn’t handle it quite right. He got a positive result, but while waiting for the confirmatory PCR test he continued to meet with other people. I don’t know if anyone claims he spread the coronavirus to additional people that way, but it put them at greater risk. That isn’t what a person is supposed to do.
Oh, some of the college football and basketball teams are using rapid antigen tests daily, but they have big budgets and can afford to use them under medical supervision. Without them we wouldn’t be having college football and basketball now, or at least not in the Big Ten.
In the spring everyone was slamming Trump about failing to get testing for all Americans. It was non stop. Testing! Science! It never made any sense, because if you’re being careful and doing what you should be, the result of a test will not change your behavior. So what’s the point in getting a test? Other than to confirm a diagnosis if you’re hospitalized, it really serves no purpose. (Add to that the possibility of getting exposed when you get tested. Standing in a long line to have someone stick a swab up your nose after they just did the same thing to a hundred other people…no thanks.) Before Thanksgiving, the MSM began to acknowledge all this perhaps without realizing it, when they began to downplay the effectiveness of getting tested, to try to get people not to rely on tests in making a decision to travel or visit on Thanksgiving.
Without a test we’d do quarantine. And that would cut significantly into my son’s vacation time to the point where it might not pay. I should point out that the government requirements on this seem to have changed now. Instead of 14-day quarantines it’s now recommending 7-10 day quarantines, which seem more reasonable given what we now know about infectiousness. And I wonder if even those new recommendations are too stringent.)
And I should ask my other son about this, but it seems the university he works for, although it is being very hardcore about limiting person-to-person contact, is going with more reasonable quarantines. Our other son works for the university and lives with us. He ended up getting a possible exposure to coronavirus — the wife of one of the co-workers to whom he was providing IT help got covid. By the time he learned of this he had already spent time at home, but he then limited his circulation at home and wore a tight mask for about five days until that co-worker got his tests results, which were negative. At that point our son ripped off his mask at home and I haven’t seen it since. He does wear a mask to work for use when he is in contact with others, but due to all the restrictions on people going to his workplace, he works from home most days. On the days when he is there he isn’t usually in contact with others.
When I had a fever back in late July, it took longer for me to get my test results. He worked from home until I got my negative result. He is fortunate that he has a job that didn’t go away with coronavirus and that he can work from home much of the time. A lot of people aren’t that lucky. But if rapid antigen tests had been available for me, it would have had less of a negative impact on his workplace. (I had Lyme Disease, not covid, but some of the initial symptoms are similar.)
At the beginning of my first bout of Lyme Disease in late July, I was able to arrange a quick test from a pharmacy after filling out an on-line form. It didn’t take long to get the test, but it took ten days to get the results. That’s not helpful enough. If I had had covid, I would have been past the infectious stage by the time I got the results.
After I drove home from getting the test, I figured out how to do it within our local medical system. That time it took less than 24 hours to arrange the drive-up test, and I had the results about 3 days after getting the test. Much faster, but it’s still too long when antigen tests can give results in 15 minutes or so.
This is so upsetting and infuriating. These tests would change the world.
These tests were approved by the FDA in August 2020. On November 17, 2020, the FDA authorized “the first covid-19 test for self-testing at home.” It looks like this situation will change now (emphasis in the original):
This Modern Healthcare article isn’t a complete list, but it’s a good article about manufacturing constraints, which are a reality. Dr. Mina has less faith in the free market than I do, and more faith in the government to overcome these constraints than I do, but it is a reality that there are manufacturing constraints. And given the FDA footdragging, who can blame the pharmaceutical companies for not making big investments months ago in something they might never be able to sell?
It’s kind of cute the way this article skirts around the issue of whether the tests should be available for at home use or not. Note the term in bold:
As a conservative, I’d prefer maximizing citizen control of health care. There are other people, such as Joe Biden, who are interested in maximizing government control and minimizing citizen control. Biden has announced that he is in favor of rapid antigen tests. Great, right? But he has said not a word about making them available over-the-counter. Do you think that omission is accidental?
But this has been a problem for over a hundred years. Conservatives (although they weren’t always called conservatives) deny and ignore an issue, whether it’s depletion of fisheries, other resources, or some type of pollution. Leftwingers scream for regulation, while conservatives deny that there is a problem. There is a standoff until the problem becomes too obvious to ignore, at which point leftwingers get their way. Conservatives, who have been busy denying the problem or ignoring it, have no further influence, so leftwingers set up deep-state regulation of the worst possible kind.
I’m afraid something almost analogous is going on here. Conservatives should be using their political pressure to demand that these antigen tests be made available for home use, so they can free us from the need for extreme government regulation. But they’re too busy denying or ignoring the problem; meanwhile leftists are busy coming up with a way to deploy these in the worst possible way–a way that will maximize their power over the populace.
A high school teammate of mine (52yo) texted me and said he had COVD-19. I asked if I could have his bass boat. He replied that I was the third one of his friends with the exact same response. We all love “Carl” of course. But he’s got a really nice bass boat.
He said that he thought he might have a cold. He has allergies, so he often coughs and blows his nose etc – so it’s hard to say. But he thinks the cold symptoms were a little worse for a few days. He’s fine now. Except that he’s just a little peeved at his ‘friends.’
I still don’t have a bass boat.
But for the very old and very sick, this is no laughing matter. Like many other diseases. If a 40 year old patient gets pneumonia, I call in a prescription for antibiotics. If an 80 year old patient gets pneumonia, I put them in the ICU. That’s just the way it is.
Reticulator, so much conflicting information and politics surrounds every aspect of COVID and treatments that I think most people have given up trying to sort through it all. I heard someone say last week that the more he reads about it the less he knows.
This is old thinking. The Corporate media will gleefully drive a false narrative now. Any opposition to the narrative will be smothered by censorship.
You can be better informed, if you read items published before 2020. It is like 100 years of virology was buried under an avalanche of TDS and we are slowing re-discovering facts. People that “follow the news” are certainly misinformed.
Dr. Michael Mina has been complaining about that, too. Early in the current pandemic there may have been an excuse for thinking this was completely novel, but not now.
I had the rapid test in NY. Takes 15 minutes. I did not realize that it was not available for home purchase. I thought that would be a good idea because I think it might help stop people from going to the doctor’s for every sniffle. You do have to stick a swab up your nose though and that it very unpleasant.
There are some that work without sticking a swab up your nose. There was some question early on whether those could be as good; in fact, I still see Dr. Mina fielding questions about that.
What does it matter if I get tested? I would have to get tested every week, every day, every hour to make sure I don’t have this “mother of all” diseases. Why am I not tested for the flu or a cold every day?
For public health purposes, you don’t need that level of certainty. For public health purposes we want to slow down the spread of the disease until it more or less dies out. Dr. Mina thinks a test once or twice as week would accomplish that. In some situations I’d want more, depending on the likely consequences of a mistake to people I care about. But if you take a callous, big-picture view he’s probably correct.
At some point the population as a whole will have enough of various kinds of immunity to this disease that the pandemic won’t be such a threat to large numbers of vulnerable people, and it will be more like flu, requiring precautions more on that level. It will be a while before we get there. These tests will ease the journey to that place, and allow life and economic activity to get a lot more normal in the meantime.
Plus, one could take get tested and directly afterwards contract the disease, before they even got the results of their test.
Were they really? I missed that. Of course, I don’t watch or read the MSM, but I usually hear echos of it here and elsewhere. If this is true, I despise them more than ever. Not that PCR tests are that helpful, but they should have been calling attention to the fact that the FDA has been blocking ready availability of the antigen tests that would be helpful.
Here you go:
Just under $20,000 I think, can I sign you up?
Moving so fast on such calm water might not be the best way to approach the places where you’ll find bass. But what would I know? When I used to go bass fishing, eons ago, I used a homemade wood-and-canvas canoe with an armstrong motor.