I’ve no idea what you are saying.
You originally claimed there was infection spreading through Taiwan at low levels.
Now you are not claiming this?
Anybody who works with clinical diagnodtics in population screening is very familiar with both false positives and false negatives.
There’s nothing mysterious about that.
If you didn’t have false positives THAT would be abnormal! It would probably mean you are missing many cases as your test was not sensitive enough.
Sigh. Nevermind.
And many living like sardines in a can. Multi generations under one roof.
Those papers didn’t have any real conclusion. The Changhua guy himself said mea culpa. He thought he’d find significant levels of community transmission. He didn’t.
Why the fuck are we arguing about two papers we can’t access anyway?
I don’t think it works. I was sitting across from someone who was positive and it never told me that.
I’m currently in quarantine (Day 11/14), and I’ll say that I’ve had my phone battery get below 20% a few times. Like today, it’s 5:30pm, and I just went to charge my phone since the battery was low and showing red.
Also, back home, I have a habit of putting my phone on airplane mode. Because my US phone plan has a high speed limit of 5GB before throttling, I like to force my phone to use WiFi when available. So even though they tell me not to use airplane mode, I’ve found myself turning it on out of habit, and then immediately realizing and worrying about the cops showing up! 
Well, for one thing, I find the complete lack of research interest in Taiwan … disturbing. You would think somebody might want to know precisely why Taiwan has been so (apparently) successful, despite the fact that other countries have followed similar paths with rather more variable outcomes. Handwaving about masks etc and saying “of course it’s because of this and that” isn’t very scientific. Those are falsifiable hypotheses, but I can’t find anything about testing those hypotheses as they relate to Taiwan, specifically.
Here’s one of the papers I mentioned:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6065(20)30041-9/fulltext
… which itself observes, with suitable deadpan:
“We searched PubMed for peer-reviewed articles and preprint reports on “seroprevalence”, “SARS-CoV-2 antibody”, “anti-SARS-CoV-2”, and similar terms, up to August 31, 2020. There were only a few and most serological studies focused on specific subpopulation in “hotspot” regions of the world. Additionally, in most serological studies only one single type of laboratory test was performed, which might generate more false positive results and over-estimate the prevalence of anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.”
In other words, nobody has really bothered looking at the Taiwan situation, and of those who did, they didn’t do a very good job.
Now, simply being published in The Lancet doesn’t mean this study is worth anything, but I’ve had a scan through and I can’t see any obvious reason to dismiss it out-of-hand. They’ve taken pains to measure and correct for false positives.
0.05% is lower than the figure I mentioned earlier, but this is a representative population, so it’s not unreasonable to extrapolate that out to “10,000 people in Taiwan have at some point contracted COVID-19”. Note only one significant figure in that statement. Note also that this study was back in May 2020, and that was a long time ago. As mentioned, nobody seems to have bothered to do anything since then … unless anyone here knows differently?
2 guys tested positive months after entering the country. Nobody knows when/where/how they got infected. The health ministry immediately says they must have been infected before they came into Taiwan but hasn’t put forth a scientific rationale for this conclusion or told anyone why they’re putting people into quarantine over infections they think happened over 3-6 months ago in another country. If they are so confident the tests are just picking up a long past infection why test and quarantine the contacts?
I have an MS in molecular biology and work for an agtech company focused on plant genetics. What’s your background?
Go ask anybody who has professional knowledge of this kind of testing and see what they tell you. Bet you a beer they tell you the same thing…multiple positive PCRs + positive IgMs in people who never reported symptoms at any time and who are not immunocompromised = more likely recent infections than infections many months ago.
It’s not science to ignore strong statistical probabilities because they create difficult questions nobody has answers to…
My colleagues and I have talked about this since they know I’ve been living in Taiwan. Lots of ideas, none very convincing. Could be high % of mask wearing. Could be that the high risk comorbidities are less prevalent here. Could be protective effects from the BCG vaccine. Could be that various sars-like viruses that don’t cause symptomatic illness have been circulating here for years and lots of locals have cross immunity. Could be genetic factors we haven’t identified yet. Could be the weather/humidity. Could be the stinky tofu. Whatever it is it’s probably multifactorial.
Every time the virus has gotten in and starts to spread it seems to die out quickly at least in terms of symptomatic cases. Would for sure be interesting for someone to study. Doesn’t seem to be much curiosity though…
There’s really only been two times.
Yeah, I think I agree with you on this. I said something similar a few days ago:
It doesn’t matter.
You aren’t qualified in clinical chemistry which is a completely different specialty.
I’ve explained already the many reasons why false positives can occur when you are doing tests in the 100ks to millions .
And yes an infection could have been picked up in Taiwan. I wouldn’t automatically rule it out or make blanket statements.
But the odds are that these people both picked it up overseas (as they were both overseas in pandemic areas) and there are no clusters associated with them in Taiwan.
You sure about that ?
Conversely, people often test positive for weeks or even months after they recover but have high CT values, suggesting the PCR has identified genetic material from noninfectious viral debris. Current guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and World Health Organization, which call for patients to isolate themselves for 10 days after onset of symptoms, recognize they are not likely to be infectious after that period. But Mina and others say the recent findings also suggest that a patient who has undergone multiple tests with high CT values is likely at the tail end of their infection and need not isolate themselves. He adds that contact tracers should triage their efforts based on CT values. “If 100 files land on my desk [as a contact tracer], I will prioritize the highest viral loads first, because they are the most infectious,” Mina says.
Nope.
It jumped out in Taoyuan very rapidly.
Early.on there were clusters in Xindian too.
What helps to cut that cluster was a very efficient and well resourced test and trace system.and quarantine system and they shut the whole hospital down.
The whole city of Taoyuan went quiet for weeks, everything was cancelled, school holidays were extended again . Serious masking up.
But the lynchpin is really the rigorous quarantine and testing system associated with that on entry to Taiwan.
These aren’t false positives. They have been counted as cases. The guys tested positive at the same time on 3 separate tests (PCR, IgM, IgG).
You’re qualified to tell other people they’re not qualified? I asked you before…what’s your background? You didn’t answer, conveniently, so I’m guessing you’re not a “clinical chemistry” expert…
I don’t need to tell you what I do lol.
I know what you do. You go on the internet telling people they’re not qualified when you disagree with them, and then when they ask you what your qualifications are, you say you don’t have to share your qualifications. Lol.
Ciao.
I’m not saying they were infected z which is likely.
What I am saying is that a high CT value months after infection is not that unusual. It seems quite regularly when people are tested coming into Taiwan too . The famous ‘weak positives’.
As for IgM and IgG being raised. It just tells you they generated an antibody response and still generating a response .But raised IgM doesn’t mean automatically they are still infectious or recently infected . It could be for other reasons.
You’ve got a chance of seeing these kind of statistical outliers when doing testing of 100ks to millions of people .
I don’t tell people I’m qualified to fly a plane when I build engines for planes.