[M T]

My Nurse friend's long term care facility was ordered to test all patients for Covid-19 this week. They usually have about 120 residents.  Here's what his wife told me today:

If people are getting tested multiple times and showing different results, I don't know how pro or college sports are gonna work.

It would be good to find out the kind of tests and the experience of the sample takers.   One of the papers I read argued that most false negatives on PCR tests are a result of bad technique of taking the sample, based on little DNA in the sample (suggesting that it would have also missed the virus RNA).

As I've said before, one of the problems that China had was when they first came up with the tests.  They only got positive results on about 3/4 of the existing patients, and then reported no new positives for 8 days or so.  This could be consistent with poor techniques of sampling, or bad reagents or lab techniques.  But I'm no health care worker and don't know if that is reasonable or not.

[M T]

My Nurse friend's long term care facility was ordered to test all patients for Covid-19 this week. They usually have about 120 residents.  Here's what his wife told me today:

If people are getting tested multiple times and showing different results, I don't know how pro or college sports are gonna work.

It would be good to find out the kind of tests and the experience of the sample takers.   One of the papers I read argued that most false negatives on PCR tests are a result of bad technique of taking the sample, based on little DNA in the sample (suggesting that it would have also missed the virus RNA).

As I've said before, one of the problems that China had was when they first came up with the tests.  They only got positive results on about 3/4 of the existing patients, and then reported no new positives for 8 days or so.  This could be consistent with poor techniques of sampling, or bad reagents or lab techniques.  But I'm no health care worker and don't know if that is reasonable or not.