Viral RNA and COVID antibody tests are different — and the US lacks enough of both to plan intelligently

© 2020 Peter Free

 

06 April 2020

 

 

Why is leadership not harping on this issue?

 

The RNA test for:

 

 

(a) someone having recently caught COVID-19

 

is different than

 

(b) the antibody test that

 

demonstrates that one is either

 

in the well-developed (often unseen) throes of the illness

 

or

 

over it.

 

 

Intelligent medical and economic planning requires . . .

 

. . . using both tests on massively comprehensive scales.

 

The first (RNA) test, to partially detect who newly has the illness.

 

And the second (antibody) test, to see who is over it and can go back to work — without infecting others or presumably reinfecting themselves.

 

 

American blundering seems to continue

 

In view of the quasi-nationwide "stay at home lock-down" — we cannot avoid destroying the American economy, unless we know whom it is safe to send back out into the workplace.

 

Right now, one would think that saving lives in the short run takes absolute precedence over saving them in the long.

 

I quarrel with that ignorantly assessed logic.

 

Just how are all these "stay at home" folk going to be able to feed themselves (or "us") — when their jobs and businesses have vanished — and they are simultaneously stripped of health insurance and have no money?

 

Does anyone honestly think that a $1,200 per person handout is going to make a noticeable difference to the coming economic collapse?

 

 

Then, there's this added irritation — American Fat Cat propaganda

 

60 Minutes is an Establishment-sponsored propaganda endeavor.

 

Last night, the 60 Minutes staff decided to run a purportedly "sensitive" presentation of America's labor and small business COVID woes:

 

 

60 Minutes, Sidelined by the coronavirus, business owners and newly unemployed Americans struggle to find a way forward, CBS News (05 April 2020)

 

 

However, nowhere did the 60 Minutes producers point to the gargantuan (and gargantuanly unnecessary) bailout of Fat Cats. Or to the contrastingly picayune — and bureaucratically difficult to get — amount of citizen aid that the same bill offers the Rabble.

 

Instead, the 60 Minutes presentation ended with one of small business's lock-down victims (Melba Wilson) reassuringly emphasizing that, "This too, shall pass."

 

Sure, it will.

 

Just like every other American crisis has always resolved itself with America's 99 percent being fleeced and/or killed by the nation's gold-sipping Predatory Master Class.

 

 

The moral? — The American ship of state sinks itself

 

Stupidity and greed combine to make an astonishingly effective democratic society killer.

 

Until we Americans pull our heads out of our eliminatory tracts, this COVID thing is almost certainly going to make the Great Depression look like fun.

 

Had we enough SARS-CoV-2 RNA and antibody tests — as well as the determination and personnel to properly use them — we could at least begin better fitting stay-at-home orders to the actual specifics of our medical and economic situations, as both necessarily change over time.

 

One cannot track, and reasonably respond to, what one unintelligently refuses to see or examine.

 

Things can "pass" in favorable and catastrophic ways.

 

Pick a side and push back.