CDC and some US states demonstrate — poor critical thinking — mixing viral RNA and COVID antibody test results

© 2020 Peter Free

 

26 May 2020

 

 

With each passing American day . . .

 

. . . it is virtually hopeless to realistically stay optimistic.

 

Consider, for example, the following news.

 

 

A 12 year old could do better

 

Proof positive that the American Establishment cannot think:

 

 

We’ve [at The Atlantic] learned that the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] is making, at best, a debilitating mistake:

 

combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever had the virus.

 

The upshot is that the government’s disease-fighting agency is overstating the country’s ability to test people who are sick with COVID-19.

 

The agency confirmed to The Atlantic on Wednesday that it is mixing the results of viral and antibody tests, even though the two tests reveal different information and are used for different reasons.

 

“The viral testing is to understand how many people are getting infected, while antibody testing is like looking in the rearview mirror. The two tests are totally different signals,” [ Ashish Jha, Professor of Global Health at Harvard] told us.

 

By combining the two types of results, the CDC has made them both “uninterpretable,” he said.

 

© 2020 Alexis C. Madrigal and Robinson Meyer, ‘How Could the CDC Make That Mistake?’, The Atlantic (21 May 2020) (reformatted)

 

 

The Atlantic lists a number of American states that are indulging the same test-mixing folly.

 

 

This error is so scientifically and conceptually basic . . .

 

. . . that I am astonished that anyone wearing a science lab coat could make it.

 

Peter Suderman at Reason commented that:

 

 

The CDC is not alone in its errors. Several states have been blending their test results as well, rendering it difficult to determine the local impact of the virus.

 

[T]he CDC's role as the officially designated first line of defense makes the agency's failure far more significant.

 

Without clear, reliable, and accurate reporting from the CDC, it becomes nearly impossible to take stock of the pandemic's damage.

 

[T]hanks to the CDC, we have a problem that is even worse:

 

No only do we not know what is going to happen, but we don't know what is happening.

 

© 2020 Peter Suderman, The CDC Is Still Botching the Coronavirus Testing Process, Reason (22 May 2020)

 

 

Broader implication

 

Given the list of previous American COVID failures — by the CDC, the Presidency and many US states — this latest example of brain-deadness merely demonstrates how thoroughly inept a high proportion of our society is — at doing even the simplest critical thinking:

 

 

It is not just that we Americans have been too institutionally lazy and too unmotivated to collect COVID data — to the depths and at the rates necessary to be useful.

 

It is that we are (evidently) too scientifically stupid to know what to do with it, even when we do have it.

 

 

Even someone decades younger than I am despairs

 

Former career Air Force officer William Astore recently wrote that:

 

 

In 1969 America reached the moon!

 

We respected science.  Many Americans were trying to end a disastrous war in Vietnam.  People marched for civil rights, they fought for equal rights, there was a sense America’s potential was nearly limitless.

 

WTF in 2020?

 

Many Americans, including our president, don’t respect science.

 

We fire doctors for calling out quack medical cures.  We put a breeder of labradoodles in charge of our Covid-19 pandemic response.

 

Wars just go on forever with little resistance.  We’re sliding backwards in rights for minorities, for women, for workers.

 

And the space program?  Moribund in the USA.  We’re very much stuck on earth, an earth that is less hospitable to life than it was fifty years ago.

 

The years 1970-2020 has defined a half-century of American decline.

 

Perhaps we might speak of five bad “emperors”: Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Shrub Bush, and Obama, now joined by Trump, our very own blend of Nero and Caligula.  He fiddles and diddles while America burns.

 

© 2020 W. J. Astore, We Put A Man on the Moon . . . , Bracing views (21 May 2020)

 

 

The moral? — It is as if evolutionary selection of the fittest is running backwards in the United States

 

Previously respected American smarts are pretty much gone. The morally worst and stupidest rule. Seemingly with the purpose of killing the best.

 

For Homo sapiens' sake, let's hope that some people(s) manage to keep the Brain Flame going.