What the heck? Delta variant testing

Now some places are reporting one of the drugs is only good for six-months, and a booster shot will be needed.

Anything to get for gov. fund$.

The thing with the 2-week lockdown, they never claimed a partial lockdown or a FULL circuit breaker lockdown was needed.

The difference, the 2-week lockdown still allowed some people to continue their regular daily routine – so they could still get and spread the virus.

The Full circuit breaker lockdown we be EVERYONE is in isolation.  No store are open.  No businesses are open.  Only essential services (police, EMS, Fire, Hospitals, military, utilities) would still be allowed.  Contact and spread would be next to nothing!

That never happened in most places.

There’s other tests for the Coronavirus, it’s just that the one that’s been used the most widely previously, the PCR testing method (which turned out to be pretty inaccurate already for pandemic circumstances) is apparently basically useless for the Delta variant… which means the most easily spammable method of testing will be of no help if that variant on its own was to reach pandemic levels (make of that what you will – biotech companies likely were earning money out of the widespread usage of that testing method).

While Covid is very much likely to get into repeated/endemic state from what it looks like right now, I’d treat most delta variant doom-mongering right now as halfway propaganda push, halfway people being propaganda pushed so far they’re panicking at an apparently more easily spreading, more dangerous variant, and because they were lead to believe vaccinating everyone was the answer, they are trying to double down on ‘encouraging’ others to vaccinate.

Basically yeah, the only way you can tell which variant is it is by either sequencing the genome itself or by throwing things at a wall and learning what it isn’t. In this case, right now, if a patient has Covid but the standard Covid-19 PCR test doesn’t show they have Covid, they are going to say this patient has the Delta strain, because the Delta strain is the current variant known to not really respond to PCR testing (because the sequence they’re multiplying, usually specifically the one where the primer would attach, has likely mutated at crucial points and to the point making that test ineffective, or the ‘cycling’ portion of the process responds badly to a particular case). That’s… a semi-viable approach, if not for the fact, like I mentioned, the PCR test itself blows as far as detecting Covid is concerned (there’s both false negatives and more false positives than you *should* be getting). It’s either that or they tested a small population and are giving numbers based on models.

Basically if you’re wrong about them using models, they’re rationalizing that ‘Every Covid case we detected via another method that was a negative on the PCR test is a Delta variant case.’

Yeah, they’re either fudging the numbers by using spread models or risk having wrong numbers by using roundabout ways of determining which patients have the delta variant by determining they have Covid but failing the PCR test on them. Mind you, the incredibly vast majority of supposed Delta cases, *if they are using the latter method*, are going to be genuine Covid cases because they used a more thorough and specific method to detect that, it’s just that unless they use genome sequencing specifically, they can’t really tell it’s ‘Covid Delta’, it’s just ‘Covid that didn’t come up on the test that Covid Delta doesn’t come up on’.

And while I have not worked with Covid PCR tests myself (though I have studied in the relevant field to have some knowledge of PCR tests) and don’t know exactly what they fudged up to make this test generally recognized as bad (could be the primers aren’t specific to the right sequence, could be the outline for the thermal cycles – I honestly doubt they’d use any other method to break apart the DNA into individual chains instead of the helix – are actually based on guesstimates), that test is… not really good in practice (further confirmed by a relative that did work with them as part of the medical services in my country).

I genuinely believe they just implemented it as the base diagnostic method for the pandemic because it’s quick, cheap, gaining real popularity with the relevant services and scientists, and is relatively simple.  That choice is still not as bad as the sudden push for the mRNA vaccines over others in a supposedly ‘critical’ world pandemic state, but that’s a whole another thing to discuss.