[native_samples]

It's not rated for children because they appear to be immune to COVID and thus basically no safety results can possibly make the risk/reward tradeoff make sense in that age group.

"one would have to determine the percentage of viable virus particles. Hard to tell whether that's even feasible at scale ... It's not too bad though. At worst this causes a higher than expected false-positive rate."

I'm not sure you're aware of the scale of the problem. There have been studies that correlated PCR test results with ability to do viral culturing and concluded about 60% of all positive test results did not imply infectiousness. For example, this one:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8166461/

[samus]

> There have been studies that correlated PCR test results with ability to do viral culturing and concluded about 60% of all positive test results did not imply infectiousness.

My point was that the viral culturing might not be feasible for large-scale testing. In that case, we might have to stick to PCR.

[native_samples]

Yes, governments use PCR because it's fast and mechanical.

The correct response to the PCR not detecting what people actually need to know is to shut down mass testing entirely. There is no point in mass testing if it creates chaos and doesn't help, which is what's happening (there is no correlation between testing levels and incidence levels, killing the theory that test test test = better results).