Wondering about the cram school teacher after 122 days.
What exactly happens to you if you test positive after so long ? They send you off to the hospital and you get locked up? If so, until when? Testes clear? If it is an imported case it means his tests might not show āclear to go homeā until another 4 months? Whatās the government procedure to deal with such cases?
Are you implying that 3 separate highly sensitive and highly specific tests (PCR, IgM and IgG) are all throwing repeated false positives for sarscov2 for the same person? Do you know the statistical improbability that someone who did not have sarscov2 would have a false positive for PCR, IgM and IgG? The healthy ministry has numbered these cases because they obviously have/had the virus.
IgM antibodies for sarscov2 decline very quickly and antibody titers are usually higher the stronger the immune response/sicker you are. Both of these guys never had any symptoms so youād expect lower antibody titers than higher ones. Positive PCRs + positive IgMs in people who never had any symptoms = thatās why itās more probable these are recent infections than infections from many months ago.
The idea that these guys have had persistent active infections for 3-6 months without any symptoms? Voodoo. Active sarscov2 infection doesnāt persist for this long in non immunocompromised people. The rare cases of months long infections have been in immunocompromised peopleā¦
One thing that baffles me is that Taiwan clearly isnāt COVID-free. There were those two research papers (which were both condemned for ethical issues but not for methodological flaws) showing that we have about 0.25% seroprevalence. Cases pop up here and there - not all imports - and they are supposedly nailed down. But is it really technically possible to track and trace with that level of success? You only have to be unlucky once, and booom.
I canāt think of any other explanation, personally. But apparently Dougie has a life sciences background so Iād be interested to hear his take on it.
Or China designed the virus so that people with Han ancestry arenāt so easily infected. And by a cruel trick of nature (good for Taiwan), it turns out that this is 100x the case when Han blood has some Taiwan aboriginal blood mixed in with it.
Not exactly .
And I am not saying they werenāt infected previously
But
I know PCR often picks up infections that were cleared months ago. There are thousands of examples around the world for coronavirus where this is happening . Iām not even aware of one case where that person was proven to have then infected somebody else three months or six months down the line. If you know of any case let me know.
IgG and IgM tests relative to PCR have poor sensitivity and specificity . So maybe in best case they could be 99 per cent specific . That means 1/100 is a false positive. Thatās a lot of false positives across the population . Sometimes they will be cross reacting with other antigens in the blood that just happen to be similar to covid-19. Sometimes the batch itself will be faulty. The manufacturers claims of specificity may not stack up well in the real world.
some people may be carrying very low level infections, because of their unusual immune system or immunocompromised
When you are doing tests across the population at large these things happen.
Number of people who have tested positive in self paid retesting must be almost forty. If theyāre picking up these infections in the community then the virus must be everywhere. But, well, itās not is it?
You know what else is funny? None of these people are ever symptomatic. Ever.
The tests are picking up historical infections from people who are coming from countries where the virus is everywhere to a country where it is nowhere.
Yeah. All of this. You would think somebody would have thought it important enough to find out a definitive answer. In fact youād think the place would be swarming with epidemiologists poking things up peopleās noses. But apparently itās a complete non-issue.