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by gloriosoc
2121 days ago
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The case of the person that got reinfected is grossly exaggerated. Don't you think if this was really occurring frequently there wouldn't be only one or two reported incidences of this world-wide? Asymptomatic carriers do definitively infect others. Just because you personally are not sure of things, doesn't mean that they are not known. And this "do nothing" approach you are advocating for- which is what happens if you wait until everything is fully and definitively proven- has resulted in the disastrous results the US has had so far. Also please explain "suggesting cataclysmic shoot-from-the-hip solutions"- I don't think anything I suggested comes close to that. I said that we shouldn't reopen colleges in places with rising cases. That doesn't seem cataclysmic to me. |
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The patient we think was reinfected was reported to have a mild case in the spring. The US, at the time, had extremely limited access to tests for anyone except the grievously ill. It is likely the patient would not have received a test in the US, and certainly not had the infection genome-sequenced.
The second time the patient tested positive, he was asymptomatic. The CDC currently recommends against testing asymptomatic individuals. It is likely that, in the US, the patient would once again not have received a test.
Basically, the US tests sparsely and doesn't seem to test longitudinally on any scale at all. Does any country in the world with more than a few thousand cases test longitudinally?
If anything, I think it's more telling that this patient was identified in Hong Kong, which only has 4.5 thousand cases total. Finding seemingly ironclad evidence in such a small pool suggests that this isn't a rare phenomenon.
If I'm advocating anything at all (and I don't think I'm advocating anything in my original comment), it's that we hold off on making aggressive policy decisions based on our Swiss cheese "understanding" of COVID immunity. How about working toward goals we set months ago and have since kept failing to meet, such as ubiquitous access to testing and meaningful case tracing?On the other hand, let's maybe hold off on jokes about sending Grandma to New Orleans? The photo of the elderly woman wearing sparkly bangles is the joke, but I think your suggestion right before that, that "we could send the highest risk people to the places that are the most immune so they could be shielded" is made seriously, right? Like, even moving an individual, medically fragile, institutionalized elderly person leads to complicated and often negative outcomes in the best of times, simply because of the complex and fragile support systems their well-being relies on. Shipping "the highest risk people" en masse and organizing care for them seems dramatically more complex than, again, following through on testing and mitigation strategies that we, as a state, have been paying lip service to for months now.