What Testing and Masks Can and Can’t Do for Us
Excerpt: I recently had a chance to pick the brain of a scientific director from one of the top ten hospitals in the United States, who has been briefing powerful decision makers since the coronavirus epidemic began. This director didn’t want to be quoted by name, lest his assessments cause headaches for his institution. I asked him what the biggest misperceptions about the ongoing pandemic are, and he offered some important points for those who think that America needs to be locked into this semi-shut-down status quo until a nationwide frequent testing regime is in place. “Politicians and other decision makers like university presidents — who are just politicians of another stripe — are a highly risk-averse species,” this scientific director told me. “If they can avoid making a tough decision, they will, and as long as they think that if we test enough people, we can identify and quarantine everyone who is infected and make the problem go away.” As he sees it, there are two problems with tests that are largely being overlooked. “One is that they’re only as good as the sample being collected. The technology is as close to perfect as you’re going to get in a diagnostic test. But if you don’t sample where the virus is, the test result will be a false negative. A recent scientific paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed concluded that the real-life sensitivity of tests where persons were collecting their own samples was down around 60 percent, which is pretty much unacceptable when testing for a contagious disease. It turns out, and this is no surprise, that you can’t rely on people to stick a swab far enough up their nose or down their throat to get a useful specimen.” He added, “the second problem is that the test is only a one-time snapshot, and it doesn’t mean that a person isn’t going to be contagious tomorrow, or even later today. That has serious policy implications and may be the only way to get people to understand that we can’t bring the risk down to zero.”
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